Of Course

Sociopathic thoughts

2008-06-03T23:44:00.004-04:00

If you practise Course thinking enough it sometimes becomes embarrassingly difficult to distinguish yourself from a sociopath. Conventional coveted values of birth and death and family and friends give way to a kind of bemused universal acceptance, which superficially resembles indifference. NOT getting excited (for example) about children's day or fathers' day has the appearance of indifference. Inside it feels like clear vision. There's the rub... what psychopath doesn't believe he has clearer vision than the others?

I'm tired of America's love affair with itself. If I see one more movie which smugly depicts New York City as the glittering skyscraper capital of the world, or brags about Manhattan's "seven million inhabitants." First of all the seven million figure pertains to all the boroughs, not just Manhattan. Second - seven million is a small town to anyone who's ever done much travelling. The "medium sized" city of Chengdu which was destroyed by last month's earthquake in China was ten million people. Seoul is twelve million, Mexico City is eighteen million, Shanghai is twenty million, Tokyo is twenty eight million. New York city is historic indeed but is not at all the unique colossus it is presented to be; architecturally or in any other way. America is rapidly marginalizing itself politically and culturally.

Memorial Day Weekend

2008-05-25T14:35:00.004-04:00

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night - only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell.

Am I conflicted because my happy little cocoon owes its existence to might, muscle and cruise missiles? Does my bloodless, stressless, vegetarian, non-sectarian, humanitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, cavity-free, low-cholesterol life really represent reality, or is that only found in the land where ignorant armies clash by night? (see below). I ask myself just how superior do I feel; up to date on all the newest studies on what is good for me and what is bad for me, with all my books and thoughts and empty postures --- my life of sugar-free wannabe purity --- my struggles with the leading edge of nothing.

There is no truth to be found, vortexing down into the mobius interior of quantum physics. There is none to be found puffing a Cohiba in the park while discussing theology --- none to be found comparing the "great body of law" with that of living breathing organisms, and none to be found dreaming up more and more clever ways to send chatter around the globe.

"But it is only natural" the ego cries, to defend the obsession with solving the insoluble. Yes it is --- and there's the rub. Canute could not hold back the tides, nor any more can we, yet we rise in the mornings and lay down in the evenings only because we believe we progress toward the eventual inevitable conquest of that problem. Who dares speak out against hope and progress? Not once do we dare stop panting, pushing, hoping, believing, dreaming that entropy is a myth and all the golden edifices of today will not transform into the flattened ashes of tomorrow... Dreaming ... "keep the dream alive," they say, for without the dream what is there? Far be it from me to suggest the end of dreaming is the end of all time. That is not yet a welcome idea.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
.-- Matthew Arnold.

The ego is not yet ready to give up "the struggle for peace" in favor of peace itself.

Memorial Day Weekend, 2008.

Clear mind and defective soup.

2008-05-18T14:22:00.004-04:00

Lots of microscopic ducks in the park, swimming doggedly in single file behind their duck mothers. What to feed ducks? I've tried bread and they eat it, but I can't help thinking they'll get acne and get fat. I tried oatmeal but it just floats on the water for a while while they swim around in it and ignore it. Once I gave them half a pancake left over from breakfast and they really enjoyed that: syrup and all. SOmeone told me they like corn, so I bought a can of green giant and offered it to them. ... no interest ... When ducks don't like something they seem to have a sixth sense about it. They don't even try it. Not one little test nibble. They just know it's yukky and ignore it. It turns out, however, I was almost correct: they do like corn, but it has to be cracked corn. They go nuts over that. Put some in your hand and hold your hand out to them and they gobble it up out of your palm. That's a really odd feeling.

The mind is simplified in proportion to the visual cortex. This month I went to Florida for a few days to see a doctor and managed to fit in one day on the beach. Beaches are visually simple. They have broad simple planes and long straight lines. All the clutter and confusion of trees and buildings melts away, and so much of the static din of everyday life subsides with it. The mind can see further, straighter, deeper. How would it be, I wonder, to live on the inside of a perfectly white sphere, with even concealed lighting and no doors, windows, or furniture.

Note to Campbell's soup company: I have yet to buy a can of alphabet soup that allows me to spell my own name. There is always at least one letter missing! What did I ever do to you?

Closing of ACIM site.

2008-05-17T01:10:00.005-04:00

Just an informational post. Nothing inspired today...

We are bringing the ACIM questions and answers site to a close this summer. There will be no further additions, though it will stay available online as a reference source. I feel like I'm saying farewell to a comfortable old house in which I have many happy memories, but all in all I'll be glad to move on to new challenges. My personal thanks to all the thousands of people who have participated over the years with questions and comments that always provoked, always stimulated, and often moved me deeply. My thanks too, to the people at the Foundation for A Course In Miracles for allowing me to be a part of this six-year project. I have grown a lot because of it, and because of all of you.

Have been in a strange space the last few months ... frantically, constantly busy, sometimes working half the night: but despite being on that treadmill -- less and less interested in conventional goals and achievements. We published a question about that this week at http://www.facimoutreach.org/qa/questions/questions292.htm#Q1342. I cannot claim I am the "happy learner" but a kind of peace is settling over me. I don't know, maybe it's just fatigue. Maybe it's old age and life is just losing luster. One side effect has been - I have lost all interest in reading books or columns or blogs about The Course. Seems like I passed through a door somewhere a few months ago, which clicked shut and suddenly shut out a whole lot of noise. With the noise gone, I realise how much I don't need it.

Went to see the new Narnia movie tonight. Fairly boring. Too long, too loud, too pointless. Too much CGI. I felt as if I were being assaulted by the music which clamored from start to finish, trying to tell me how to feel about every detail. The kids (in the movie) were fairly ineffective as heroes. Too bland, too British. They were like "the Railway Children." I do see they've re-issued "Last Year At Marienbad" up in Chicago. I'm hoping it will come to other cities. If you haven't seen this 1961 French classic, please do, if you get a chance.

Charlton Heston died ... when I was a boy I saw Ben Hur about 20 times and it was probably responsible for making me want to go into Film and TV work (which I did.) Now 50 years later I saw an interview with Gore Vidal about writing the script, and he was saying the only way to make the dialog scenes between Heston and Boyd (Ben Hur and Messala) anything but wooden and dull, was to postulate a homosexual relationship between them as boys. That's why Messala feels so spurned, and turns on his boyhood best friend. he is a jilted lover. They told Steven Boyd about this but they didn't tell Charlton Heston. Heston just "acts" and grimaces his way through it. Wow! Life has strange rivers.

I sent off to Hong Kong for a DVD of Ben Hur with Chinese subtitles, so my wife can understand the plot, but I can't sit through it any more. To me it is wooden even with the interesting new sexual undertones.

I miss London, you know? I had a flight booked there last month but I had to cancel it because I was just too busy with medical stuff. Maybe next year.

It turns out my nurse who spends one week a month with me giving me treatments has a husband who has a house down in Florida that sits empty most of the year. Occasionally he'll go down there for a week. But here's the odd thing -- she told me the property taxes are $14,000 per year. The house is in Volusia county which I know has a pretty average tax rate, so that must be at least a million dollar home. Just sitting empty! Why does that bother me?

The End of the Big Apple.

2008-02-02T16:56:00.000-05:00

There's an apple perched on the shelf by the door. It's a bright green apple and it's large -- about two or three feet in diameter. It doesn't fit too well up there so it's half on and half off the shelf. I'm not sure what door this is exactly. It seems to be in the corner of a dark room. It is half-open, plain, and perfectly rectangular like those little computer icons for "exit." That's all I can really tell you about the room I'm in. It's dark in here, and other than the area by the door it is all dusk and nothingness. This doesn't seem too unusual: nothing does in dreams. Nor is it surprising that any effort to inspect the door or the apple cause it to disappear from view like Alice's house in "Through the Looking Glass." One thing I've learned about dreams is - I can't direct them. Any effort I make to consciously control my actions results in the dream vaporising. So I have to be perfectly passive, but here's the catch 22 - I have to make a conscious effort to be passive - and that conscious effort always ends the dream. So whenever a dream gets interesting enough to rouse my curiosity that's the kiss of death. There's a very small time window after that in which to explore the image, float across the floor, zoom through the window, finish the piano concerto, ask my mother that question, save the cat from choking on the spaghetti, see her face (who is she?), cram the cherries into the crystal jar and struggle with the lid, and buy the broken-down car from the Indian man who sits in the office - except I'm suing him because he didn't give me the glue to fix the chair and he doesn't know that, but if he finds out he won't sell it to me.

It's hard, very hard, to lie prone at the epicenter of a dream and just do nothing. For one thing the buzzing kaleidoscope of the dream is too attractive. Not attractive as in beautiful but attractive as in gravity. Every little flickering phenomenon dislodges us and we begin rolling toward it like ballbearings on a tray that just tilted. I wonder how might it be - to be completely tranquil? Completely at peace. Completely without concepts. That's the trick, you know... not to ignore the bubbling static of the world, but not to recognize it ... or try to. The Buddha sits in a world of formlessness, formless herself. The Buddha does not say "Ah that is an apple but I will ignore it." The Buddha sees no apple and says nothing. The Buddha sees no green. Apple is a concept. Green is a concept. Concepts are labels we use to assign forms to the formless because formlessness is non-identity, formlessness is fear. Concepts are the atoms and molecules of consciousness. We click them together and rearrange them like Lego for the ego, forever trying to model what we think lies beyond the fundamental dualistic division of me and not-me.

Nirvana is a sanskrit word that is hard to translate. One explanation is - the highest happiness, release from karma - but that is more an outcome than a translation. Another good one is - to cease flickering - like a flame that becomes steady and calm. The best one I ever heard was from Kalu Rinpoche at an Ashram in Toronto in 1976. Was I a seeker in those distant days? Hell no! I was a cameraman. Rinpoche came to Toronto and I went to Union Station to film his arrival, in yellow and saffron robes, greeted from the train by a Buddhist dance troupe ??!?! Then I went to the ashram to hear him speak - through a translator. Someone asked: "What is nirvana?" He answered all questions in Tibetan so the translation is not really his, but his translator's translation ... if you can follow that ... The answer was: "Nirvana is the end of all concepts."

You know, when I started writing this I had no idea what I was going to say. Now I've said it and I've no idea if I said anything. It's all a dream anyway.

How do we know when to say no?

2008-01-30T17:05:00.000-05:00

This opinion was kindly written and contributed by "Marian," and is very timely and appropriate to the present discussion. Marian and I have known each other via mutual internet blogs for a couple of years (and yet she still talks to me!!) We are both students of ACIM, so I asked her to guest-write for me. You can visit her blog here. Feel free to leave comments here for her if you like.

There's a Simpsons episode in which Old Gil, the sublime, hapless, unemployed victim, insinuates himself into living with the Simpsons, mainly because empathic, soft-hearted Marge can't say no. Days, weeks, months fly by and he's still there. Marge swears every day that she's going to throw the bum out (he's not a good house guest, obviously) but chickens out. Finally at the end of nearly a year, she reaches her last straw, storms into the house ready to throw him out, and discovers that he's already gone.

"But I have a big 'NO' inside of me waiting to get out!" she says. At this moment, Homer walks into the room dangling a thousand-dollar bill from his fingers and says, "Hey Marge, want a thousand dollars?" And of course, she yells, "NOOOOOOO!" And he takes his lighter out and incinerates it before she can say, "Wait! I mean YES!"

Why are we so confused as to how to respond to people whom we believe are less fortunate than we are? Is it possible to see someone as a victim if we ourselves don't feel like victims? And if we can clearly see the ways in which the pained person has chosen his or her fateÑthen what constitutes help? What is kindness?

Let's start here, from A Course in Miracles:
"The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this is still true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream." T.27.VII.10.1-6

And here, from Jane Roberts/Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality:
"Again, if you are ill you may say, "I did not want to be sick," or if you are poor, "I did not want to be poor," or if you are unloved, "I did not want to be lonely." Yet for your own reasons you began to believe in illness more than health, in poverty more than abundance, in loneliness rather than affection."

Even if we accept these messages as true, which I do, we must still admit that telling someone who is in pain, or who has just lost everything, or who is grieving, that he is doing this to himself, is not kind. Nor would it be kind to say that this is all just a bad dream. Using the movie analogy, if there is a fire in the projector, we will see the fire on the screen. In this life, when we are burning with guilt and confusion in our minds (the projector) we experience the fire on the screen of life -- the projection.

Is it ever correct to throw water on the projected fire? Can using magic to alter the illusion ever quench the fire in the projector? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends upon how willing the person is to change their mind. But the real question is, how do we access that knowing? How do we know if we are actually helping, or just being a nuisance and making the overall situation worse in the long run? When are we acting just to appease our own delusional guilt, and when are we actually helping?

We can only help someone at the level at which they are willing and able to accept help in this very moment. In future moments, they may receive something deeper from the gesture we make today, but right now, we can only pour our help into the shape of their receptacle. Knowing whether it is our business to do the pouring is a matter of the heart, not the mind. Within the framework of this dream we call life, we run into trouble when we begin to make intellectual decisions about whom we should or should not help. Thought, which is both the existence and the vehicle of the ego, is not the place to look for advice on this matter.

If the suffering person's help-receptacle has a leak, then we will be pouring that same form of help into it until we are exhausted, or until they are willing and able to patch the leak. Sometimes, as in the case of Mark, the leak is an addiction to a certain type of ego sensation. Sometimes, as in the case of aid money to Africa, the leak is corruption on the part of the distribution officials -- an addiction on the part of many people to a certain type of ego sensation.

As is the case with all decisions, because we are so messed up in the judgment department, it is imperative to get quiet, go silent in the mind if only for a moment (in the case of a panhandler) or for a longer period (in the case of a longer involvement) and ask for help in seeing clearly. Are we helping because we ourselves are suffering, and so we have an increased projection of suffering upon the people in our lives? Are we hoping that by helping someone else we will alleviate our own inner guilt and purchase our own salvation? Are we simply afraid to say no? Do we have a belief that it is wrong to say no, and a fear of repercussions if we do?

As any parent will tell you, there is tremendous relief to be had in throwing money and material goods at a nagging problem to make it go away. But in many cases, the resistance to saying no to someone else's demands is exactly the same as our inner resistance to saying no to our own ego. We are terrified of that feeling of emptiness when a demand is made. We aren't hungry, yet the ego demands food. We have things to do, yet the ego demands the oblivion of television or the internet. We know we should remain silent, yet the ego demands that we speak. We know we shouldn't give our child what she is asking for in the store, but the ego is terrified of the disapproval of our fellow shoppers when the child throws a tantrum. If we are afraid to stop our habitual responses and say no to the ego, we will be afraid to say no to another person. We will not truly understand the constructive and loving importance of sometimes saying no.

The ego IS fear. And if we are tempted to say no to someone when they are asking for something, we will always experience a flash of fear. So how do we tell the difference between this type of situation and plain old selfishness? Doesn't the Course tell us that if our brothers ask us for something "outrageous" we should do it because it does not matter? That we should do it because otherwise our opposition establishes the dream as real?

The answer is probably this: if we would feel fine about saying 'no,' then we'll be able to say 'yes' appropriately. In order to make a correct decision about anything in life, we have to have access to a complete palette of responses. If some of the responses are cordoned off by fear, or its handmaidens of political or religious dogma or intellectual philosophy, then we cannot act correctly. So in this case, if we are afraid to say no, (or yes), we are prejudging the situation and throwing the election -- no matter what it seems the Holy Spirit may be saying. We are deciding on the answer before we even ask the question.

So where is forgiveness in all of this? Forgiveness means we overlook our opinions about the nature of reality. We release ourselves from any concepts and beliefs we have about what is happening in front of our eyes. We accept it and respect it, without demanding that if be other than what it is -- without demanding that it be different. So when someone is impoverished, our first thought is not a knee-jerk reaction that says "this should not be happening." Our first thought is not "how can I change this?". We should not automatically assume that anything needs to change.

I'm not saying, of course, that if you see a child running into the street in front of a car you should not do the automatic and loving thing. But what I am saying is that even if a person seems to be experiencing a life of great hardship, we need to have ultimate respect for their choice of lessons, before we decide that we should intervene. It's not a decision, again, that should be made from a religion, a philosophy, or a dogma. It's a decision that is made in the present moment, from a position of silent receptivity to the part of ourselves that can see what we cannot.

There are people in this world who have a hotline to their Source, and who can help without becoming a nuisance. For the rest of us, I think it's important to learn to get our preconceptions out of the way first, before we try to help someone -- preconceptions not only about what help would look like, but about whether or not help is appropriate in the first place.

Here's one last quote. This is from Eva Pierrakos, channeling "The Guide," Lesson 175, Consciousness
"Since the possibilities are endless, infinite, and limitless, the consciousness can explore itself also by confining itself, by fragmenting itself off -- to "see what happens," as it were. It experiences itself: instead of expanding more, it contracts, instead of unfolding, it tries out how it feels to draw in; instead of exploring further lights, it wants to see how it is to feel and experience darkness. Creating is fascination per se. This fascination is not eliminated simply because what is created is -- first perhaps only by slight degrees -- less pleasurable or blissful or brilliant. Even in that may lie a special fascination and adventure -- just to tentatively try, if I may use these very limited words.
Then it begins to take on a power of its own. For everything that is created has energy invested in it and this energy is self-perpetuating. It takes on its own momentum. The consciousness who has created these channels and pathways may experiment longer and more than it is "safe" because it no longer leaves itself enough power at the moment to reverse the course. It may get lost in its own momentum, unwilling to stop, and later it no longer sees how to stop on this course. Creation then takes place entirely, or primarily, on a negative scale, until the results are so unpleasant that it seeks to get a hold of itself and counteract the momentum by "recalling" its real knowledge of what could be.
At any rate, it knows there is no real danger, for whatever suffering you human beings feel, it truly is illusory in the ultimate sense. Once you find your true identity within, you will know it. It is all a play, a fascination, an experiment, from which your real state of being can be recaptured, if only you will truly try."

Tied Up ... conclusion

2008-01-26T19:55:00.000-05:00

There must be fanatics out there who troll the Internet daily looking for any mention of their sacred cows so they can immediately send angry comments. One small mention of Ayn Rand, a relatively insignificant literary figure with a hard-core cult following, seemed to attract a storm of protest. The comments from "Richard", an Ayn Rand groupie up in Toronto were pretty typical of the ilk. Either you completely submit to the dogma, or you are "refusing to be rational." There is no question of disagreement. That does not compute. Some people are just plain old control freaks, masquerading as philosophers. The Internet is a rich hunting ground for them.

About a month has gone by. Mark still does not have a job. I have fixed up a couple of interviews for him with business colleagues. Both seemed keen to meet him but neither hired him. They both gave me different excuses - along the lines of - "we really don't have any vacancies," which is not what they said when they asked to meet him. It could have something to do with his appearance, which is getting very shabby. Whenever I give him a ride somewhere these days I need to deodorize my car afterwards. The other day I gave him money for a haircut, but he didn't get a haircut and he didn't give back the money.

He's living in a homeless shelter now. I don't know exactly where it is; as an "inmate" he's not allowed to say. The shelter is in a church building and consists of about 30 mattresses on the floor, with a shared bathroom. Sometimes there is hot water. No phones, radios, computers, etc., are allowed. The church does not want anyone knowing it is a shelter so no-one goes in or out directly. Instead, all the residents have to congregate at some church "office" about 10 miles away, every evening at 7.00. Then they are given a breathalyser test and placed in a small inconspicuous unmarked bus, and ferried down to the shelter where they must enter quickly through a back door. They are not allowed out again till 7 am, when they are taken 10 miles by bus back to the office and released for the day. I think they are given sandwiches. He can stay there a maximum of 30 days. That's usually about the time of day Mark calls me to ask me if I can take him here or take him there. If it's job-related I will often agree, but it's surprising how few actual job interviews he goes to, and how many coffee bars all over town he wants to go to, for no good reason.

He is now getting some kind of counselling through the Easter-Seals organization. I'm not sure to what extent this is psychological, and to what extent vocational. I do know he berates them as "idiots" who just want to "control" him. Nonetheless I've noticed some adjustment in his attitude since he started going there. He now occasionally makes a point of thanking me for my help, and talks a lot about how he is responsible for his own situation and has to be constructive and make the best of it. This is all good I suppose, but I can't help thinking it is just lip-service. I think perhaps these topics come up in counselling and he is just echoing this new lexicon (with his oratorical flair) to show me and show the world how adjusted, humble and contrite he is.

I know, I know: now I am the cynic. But I have my reasons for my suspicions. First, these concessions to humility are usually only made at the start of a meeting. By the time an hour or two has elapsed he is back to his old negative self. Second there is the strange matter of Mark and the Internet. Why are his long empty days spent in one coffee-bar after another, where he nurses one small cup of the cheapest brew for hours. Every time I pick him up or drop him somewhere it has to be at a Starbucks or a Caribou or Panera ... all places that have wireless Internet. He is never without his laptop. As time went by I began to wonder what on earth was so important about the Internet. We all send and get a little email and need to look up a few things here and there ... but there is no need to live day and night in cyberspace, any more than one needs to live in the Post Office, or in the library. I would ask him; "Mark --- why the hell do I need to take you all the way to ______?" He would answer "Because they have free Internet there." I would ask: "What on earth is so important about the Internet? You need a job, not an Internet connection." He would say mysteriously: "Well I need to dig up some stuff online." Well fair enough. Sometimes we all need to "dig up" some stuff online, but all day? Every day? Month after month? When you're out of work and homeless? What is that all about?

A few days ago he hung out at my house for a few hours. I gave him a chair and a little table for his laptop and left him alone. Later I needed him to look at something so I said "can you come here for a moment?" He said "Hang on -- I just need to finish something ---" and he was typing busily. Then he was sitting back looking at his screen for a minute, then typing again, then waiting, and so on. He had a kind of half-smile on his face. I realised he was chatting online. I know it was none of my business but a little alarm bell was ringing in my head. I asked him outright "What are you doing?" He said he was talking in a "support group." "What kind of group?" "Oh," he said nonchalantly, "It's Al-Anon. Some of those people are pretty messed up."

How many of "those people" did he know? How did he know they were "messed up"? It occurred to me that this was what he did all day long, and had been doing since I met him. He lived online in some kind of support group, and was for all intents and purposes addicted to it. Not an hour could go by when he did not have to find some way to log on and participate. Everything else, including finding a home, finding a job, making and keeping friends in the "real world", was secondary. He could tolerate and rationalize being penniless and rootless, he could tolerate living in a world of "idiots" that constantly tried to victimize him, but he couldn't tolerate being without wi-fi and a laptop. Were these cyber-people his real "family"? Did he really have deep, lasting, meaningful relationships with "Anxious in Alaska", or "DayByDay in Denver" while his exterior life crumbled?

I would guess probably not. Calling them "messed up" is a fairly strong clue. He obviously doesn't see himself as "messed up." With his natural dominant traits and his flair for dogmatizing I wouldn't be surprised if he were dishing out advice and rhetoric to gullible minds. He had an Internet following... a little kingdom where he could be king, unlike the cold unfriendly wastelands of the world in which his body lived. It was that half smile that said as much. There was something so out of place about it on a face so habitually careworn and creased. it was not a benign smile of affection or forbearance. It was a crocodile's smile; all salivation and anticipation of a forthcoming kill. It was the smile of Richard III: "I can smile, and murder while I smile..."

He is probably very good at it. People who become "sponsors" in 12-step groups are sometimes covertly very controlling types, who want to dominate the lives of others. The naive new 12-stepper is an easy mark. But to do this it is necessary for the sponsor himself/herself to ignore his own plight. Perhaps not ignore it, but certainly use it as a tool to gain credibility and an advantage. If the sponsor ever recovers and moves on, they no longer qualify to sponsor others. Fortunately in the world of 12-stepping no one ever recovers from anything. To do so would be to stop being a victim, which would be too radical. Instead you just move up the seniority list.

So the day arrived recently when my phone rang at 8 am. I knew who it was of course. Mark knows perfectly well I tend to work until very late at night, and don't get up before 9. He knows this but he seems to think he has a free pass because of the "urgency" of his situation. On that day he wanted me to pick him up at some Starbucks and take him to fill out an application for a driving job in a town an hour away. Something inside me clicked. I said - "I'm sorry, I'm tied up today." There was a long terrible pause. Then he said "OK, what about tomorrow?" I said "I'm pretty busy tomorrow too. In fact I'm tied up all week." There was an even longer pause which smelled of "deeply wounded" then a few faltering remarks about "well -- ok --- I guess I'll work something out --- " etc. Then: "See you." and he hung up. He never bothered to ask how I was, but then, he never did. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn't. I was afraid I'd just sent him to jump off a bridge.

I know I've painted him as a selfish irresponsible pig, but that was this week. Last week I painted him as a hapless victim of circumstance who slipped through the net. The week before he was a fallen God who could find no comfortable home on earth. Yes, all the same person. Which is the real Mark? Is he the hopeless hapless victim, or is he a predatory irresponsible bum? Which is the real Derek? Am I the Samaritan who tries to dress the stranger's wounds or am I the one who passes by on the other side of the street? Am I healing myself by trying to heal the life of another, or am I taking on too much responsibility for the plight of others. Can we/should we/must we try to change the world into a kinder gentler place, given that the world was designed to be a place of insoluble problems and endless suffering, laced with just the occasional promise of happiness for bait? What would Jesus do? What would you do?

I know what I did. I uttered those prescient words -- "I'm tied up." It doesn't matter how you say them -- to someone who is totally dependent on you they are a death sentence. To someone who is just using you they are a notification that the game is over. Either way they are three words that mark the end of an era. What did I achieve with them?

Time and my fridge door will tell.

Tied Up ... continued

2008-01-13T18:56:00.000-05:00

Things seemed to go from bad to worse for Mark. He had some kind of a fight with the owner of the limo company and parted company. His car bit the dust and he was without transportation. He was doing some kind of telemarketing work for a while ... Did you ever get those calls at home from police charity organizations where the caller is firm, deep-voiced and authoritative, and you are suppose to think this is a cop calling you and you'd better cough up a donation, or next time you call 911 you'll be put on indefinite hold? Chances are that was Mark calling you, or someone like him. These companies advertise for deep-voice sales reps, and give them a sales script that implies they are police personnel.

When you have child-support payments it often doesn't pay to work low-wage jobs. As soon as you earn any money they garnish your wages and you are left with nothing. If the child is living in a reasonably wealthy situation, and won't be seriously affected, it's almost better to let the back-payments accrue until you can earn a decent salary.

Anyway I next ran into him when he was unemployed and staying at a friend's house. He was trying to get work but was at the end of his rope because he had no transportation, his "friend" wanted to kick him out, and they were about to cut off his cell-phone for non-payment. The extent of his accommodation was apparently a mattress on the floor. Not a joyous situation.
I wished I had a big house with a spare room. I would have given him a roof over his head for a couple of months so he could get back on his feet. You might think people like that just use people like me, and he had no real desire to work. You might be right. But one thing I know from 25 years of chronic illness is -- it gets the better of you sometimes. You can see doctors and fight with insurance companies till you're blue in the face but there comes a time when you're just too worn down and weak and depressed to go on. At times like this you don't need someone telling you to "smarten up." You need help to get back above that threshold of dysfunction, so you can continue the battle. Mark's life seemed a bit like that to me. I saw him as below that critical point and I didn't want to judge him for it.

But all this is hypothetical. I didn't have a big house. I lived in a small apartment and there was just room for my wife and I. A third body just would not fit.

I needed some instruction manuals written for some software. Mark had a laptop and was pretty software-savvy, so I "hired" him to write for me in his "spare-time" and gave him a $200 "advance". I didn't really think I'd see those manuals any time soon. After an emotional session when he almost broke down and cried, I also paid his phone bill for him, so he could continue trying to find work. Finally I offered to drive him to any job interviews he might arrange.

I think I took him to about four interviews altogether -- all limo or cab companies. Nothing came of it. Finally he told me in desperation he had to check into a (psychiatric) facility because he just could not carry on this way, living in such stress and uncertainty. He admitted he was depressed and acting self-destructively, and said he needed some kind of medication and some breathing space. "If not," he said, "it is not a matter of if, but when."

Perhaps in Europe or Canada such a public-health facility would be easy to locate, but in the US, the first question every place asked was - "What type of insurance does he have?" When I told them he had none, they weren't interested. We finally found a public-health psychiatric clinic that accepted uninsured walk-ins. It was a long drive on a cold gray December weekend afternoon. I dropped him off there after filling out a few forms, and waiting in a grimy waiting-room till a counsellor agreed to see him.

But they just put him out on the street with a name and phone no. to contact during the week for regular counselling. The fact that he had no funds, no food, no job, no car, no resources, and soon -- no place to live -- was not really their department. The question is - was it my department? It was two days before Christmas now, and this man was about to be sleeping on the street or in a homeless shelter. I began a frantic internet search for charities, churches, shelters, government agencies, benefits, welfare, any resource he could fall back on to help him through this time. This man had worked and paid taxes for 35 years of his life. Where was the State when he needed it? What I found out was basically this: if you're not a pregnant woman, or a victim of abuse, or a child, you might as well forget it. You are on your own.

I remember Christmas Eve I had a conversation with him on my cell-phone. I was basically trying to talk him out of suicide. I have a friend in England who works for Samaritans and I thought maybe there would be a Samaritans agency listed in our city ... There was one: however it was a church counselling agency with "reduced fees" for those who are "eligible" and it operated Monday-Friday. Hardly 911. I was in a restaurant grabbing a sandwich and my conversation must have been loud, because when I hung up a woman near me said "It's always hard trying to help friends, isn't it?" I started talking with her a bit and told her the problem. The conversation went like this:

"Well - McDonald's is hiring. He can go work there."
"But after child-support is taken out there's nothing left for him to live on."
"Oh well -- in that case he deserves his situation. The child deserves to live a good life."
"The child has a great life. Both parents are wealthy attorneys, and she lives in a big house."
"And she deserves to. If he has to pay support he must have been a bad father."
"Perhaps he was. I'm sure he did the best he could. But doesn't he deserve a good life too?"
"Not if he abandoned his wife and child."
"Why do you think he did that?"
"It happens all the time."
"Aren't you punishing him without a trial?"
"Well I certainly don't believe in welfare!"

I don't want to change the subject but there's a lot of male-bashing in charity. Sweet children and poor delicate or pregnant women are automatically innocent and deserving of help, while males are automatically guilty and responsible for their own misfortunes. One more interesting point came to light. It turned out this woman had MS and was getting care under medicare and medicaid. If medicaid isn't welfare, what is it? Of all the people for me to meet on Christmas Eve, I had to meet Ayn fucking Rand!

So why didn't I invite Mark over for Christmas? It would have been the thing to do. The answer is because frankly I couldn't stand him. Nor can my wife. Despite all I've said, he remains a negative, domineering know-it-all. I made a commitment to ferry him to job interviews and I did. I told myself I had answered the call of duty and beyond. I didn't have to adopt him. I didn't have to drive across town, pick him up, bring him home, sit around all day watching TV and eating and listening to him sound-off about his situation, then drive him all the way home again late at night. I find Christmas pagan enough as it is, without inviting Eeyore the donkey over to sit it out with me.

Should I have taken his suicide threats more seriously? "Not a matter of if, but when," he said. That is a clear enough indicator. But I reported that to all the hospitals and facilities I called, and I told it to the public-health clinic. They just let him out on the street. Surely if they did not consider him a threat to himself, then he wasn't. Still I worried about him. Friendless and cold on a mattress on a floor on bleak Christmas day, with nothing to look forward to. Am I my brother's keeper? Yes; but how literally and personally should I take that. Should I try to be like Mother Theresa, a foot-soldier engaing in one-on-one hand-to-hand combat with poverty and disease? I don't have that in me. I pay taxes, give to the occasional charity, help out the occasional friend, and try to live with myself. I suppose I think because of my taxes and my charity contributions help is always available to those who really need it. "He sees the meanest sparrow fall."

Well just try getting it! The plain truth is, in this land of the free, there is really little or no safety net for people like Mark. He just slipped through all the cracks. He could not even get a few d0llars in unemployment benefits because all his jobs for the last few years had been some kind of "self-employed" or "contractual" work, and for whatever reason - he didn't qualify. Now maybe if he spent six weeks standing in line at various government agencies, filling out forms, making endless calls, and jumping through hoops, he might be eligible for some kind of help. But all that requires time and effort, a car and a phone, a place to stay, and mostly - enough energy to face the grind. When you're at the end of a rope like he was, it was an impossible obstacle.

I say again. There is no safety net. No safety cushion. If you are not physically ill, or disabled, or a veteran, or a mother with child, or a Native American -- no one will catch you if you fall. If you cannot function in society, but have no visible reason for your failure, society seems not to care. Mark told me one day that he was thinking of holding up a liquor store, not because he needed the money, but so he could become a ward of the state prison and get three meals a day.

In London I have a friend who was diagnosed schizophrenic when he was about twenty. He's fifty now and has spent the last thirty years living on a government allowance, in a government paid high-rise apartment, with a free bus-pass. In many ways his life is much better than mine. The State looks after the less fortunate there. There are agencies everywhere willing to help. They just don't expect everyone to be an able-bodied Horatio Alger, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Starting with the Clinton administration, the US has been on a rapid withdrawal from the Welfare-State mentality. "Welfare-to-Work" was the buzz of the era, and I think that's a good thing insofar as a lot of able-bodied people took unfair advantage of government benefits. But have we gone too far the other way? My Ayn Rand friend would say no, but who -- other than family -- is there to catch and heal those who just cannot cope with society's demands? Where is the kindness and compassion that should be the hallmark of civilization?

In Virginia I rented an apartment from a friend who was a fairly successful small-businessman. He was a kind and a gentle man but he fell into some kind of dispute with his business partner, and it looked like he would lose control of his business. No one was worried: he had money, he had a nice house, he was well known and well-liked in the community, he was engaged to be married. But he fretted and worried and drove himself into a solitary frenzy over what he would do for the rest of his life. No one took him seriously. I didn't. I just told him everything would work out. So he had nowhere to go. He was in some kind of private hell and no one would listen.

I have his obituary on my fridge-door. "Passed away unexpectedly" it says, which is the standard obit-euphemism for suicide. He put a gun in his mouth.

In Georgia I installed a computer system in a store one Sunday afternoon. The manager let me in. We chatted during the day and he told me about his divorce years ago, and how he lived alone now. He said if he hadn't divorced he could have retired, but now he was obliged to keep working. But now he had a good job, and a new girlfriend who came over on weekends. He seemed worldly but not world-weary. He did not seem like a man at the end of his rope. After that weekend I talked to him on the phone a few times about computer questions... nothing out of the ordinary. Then one day about 6 weeks later his boss called me and told me his manager had not shown up for work and had not answered his phone, so he went over to his house to see if he was OK. It was another gun-in-the-mouth. No note.

There but for the grace of God go I. I find life on Earth hard enough to tolerate sometimes. A long meaningless scramble down a treacherous slope to inevitable pain and death. Not exactly a "club Med" scenario. I can no longer glibly look the other way when friends start to tumble uncontrollably down that slope. ... but even though I can't do it glibly, I still do it.

I'll finish this next time.

Sorry, I'm tied up.

2008-01-05T17:27:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just don't know how to think about something. Half of you wants to see it one way, the other half tugs in another direction. After a while you distance yourself from the internal conflict and start giving your thoughts glib labels like "the right-minded thought" and "the wrong-minded thought". Then you are alarmed to find you really don't know which is which, and the whole thing is a great gray area.

I have a friend Mark (not his real name). I met him a few years ago in a coffee shop somewhere. He's about 55. I remember we chatted a bit about China because I overheard him say he'd been there. It seems he and his wife went to Guangzhou to adopt a small girl. Since then they have divorced, and he now pays child-support. I could only imagine how acrimonious the divorce must have been; he had no reservations about telling me he didn't even have visitation rights. He was struggling in a dead end sales job trying to raise money to buy a house, so he could gain "credibility and respectability" and win back some role in the life of his daughter. All this on a first meeting! The striking thing about Mark was his voice. It was an effortless deep resonant baritone, like a radio announcer on steroids. It had that enviable Richard Burton/James Earl Jones quality that could simply read the city phone book out loud and make you listen in enchantment. He combined it with a slow, deliberate, oratorical speaking style, and the result was - I felt I was speaking with the Oracle. Nothing he told me sounded ordinary or commonplace, even though bitter divorces and child-support are not exactly rare.

Time went by and I ran into him quite often - always in that coffee shop. I guess I go there a lot, but so did he. In fact he used it as a kind of headquarters where he held court with anyone who would listen, about marriage, divorce, world affairs, politics, economics, education -- whatever you wanted to discuss, he had a strong opinion. Talking with Mark I always felt slightly puny and inferior, like a tiny dog yapping to be heard. It was the pure authority of his voice. I don't think he deliberately tried to drown people out: he just spoke normally and it happened. He made me doubt my rightness.

If you analyzed Mark's opinions about the world, they always distilled down to one thing: he was a victim. All politicians were corrupt and we are the victims. The economy is in a mess and we are the victims. The Church is corrupt and we suffer. His ex-wife was a heartless bitch and he was the victim. His job was thankless, his employer was unappreciative, and he was exploited. His car was broken down and unreliable because the car-dealer is a crook and he was cheated. His credit history was a mess because he was a victim of the divorce and the court-system which had forced him to borrow beyond his means. He had no decent home-life because the place he was living was "a dump." The city in which we lived was for "losers." It had no culture and no social life. The people were all provincialites with no real clue. The local economy was dreadful and it was impossible to make a good living here. "I've got to get out of here!" he would say regularly. "I want to get back to Baltimore. It's a different world there." As you read all this you might be forgiven for thinking this guy sounds like a real loser. You would be right. Stripped of all color and tone, the facts point to the classic victim syndrome. But -- oh my -- the color and the tone were so significant. A story that would have said: "I'm a bum" on other lips, seemed to say "I'm a wounded god" coming from him.

Mark was a regular churchgoer even though he had nothing positive to say about his church-friends. Once he asked me if he could go to an ACIM meeting with me. It was amusing to watch the faces of the others at the meeting when it was Mark's turn to read. I think they took him for the new messiah, such was the richness of his voice. In fact he had no acquaintance with the material at all. It was just another city phone-book to him. After the meeting we went for a meal (I paid of course: he never had money) and he engaged me in a fierce debate about the metaphysics of the Course, calling it "sophistry." It makes perfect sense for someone with a victim mindset to be angry about a book that teaches us we made-up all our own problems.

He began a new job, driving for a limousine company. He could work his own hours, and if he applied himself he could earn good money. From then on whenever I saw him in the coffee house he was sleeping. He would stop by there after a 16 hour driving shift and fall asleep in the chair. I would tap him to wake him up and say "Hi," but there was never any joy on his face, just weariness and disgust at the great weight he perceived he had to bear. Usually he would mutter "I need to get home and get some sleep" for about an hour, before finally getting up and lurching off like a defeated heavyweight.

More about Mark. He'd obviously had a "good" education. he could hold forth on most issues. How many people do you know who could accuse the Course of "sophistry?" I wish I knew a few more. He was quite overweight and becoming more so. You get to a stage of weight gain where none of your clothes fit you, and you either can't afford new ones, or you don't want to buy them because it would be admitting defeat. So you look shabby. So you feel shabby. You don't look after yourself. You don't shave. You don't trim your hair. You don't eat well. You gain more weight. You don't exercise. Movement becomes more of an effort. Slowly your breathing becomes labored. Slowly your arteries are clogging. He smoked. Every ten minutes, no matter what the weather, he had to go outside and light up. He drank far too much coffee. It seems his whole life was broken into alternating ten-minute cycles of caffeine and nicotine. Yet somehow he always managed to convey an air of exiled nobility; not really a loser on a slow decline, but a great man with a great past and a future, taking temporary respite in the land of ordinary people.

How do you feel about Mark so far? Have you judged him yet? Something in me made me keep a flame of hope alight for him. I wanted to see him through these difficult times...
But I see now that was predicated on the assumption these times would end someday...

I will post more of this story in a few days.

Better Living Through Chemistry

2007-10-26T01:26:00.000-04:00

if you could take one pill a month to create a state of perfect peace of mind, would you do it?

This is the problem on my mind these days . It is not really a new question – just a different form of an old question. In philosophy there is a hypothetical situation called “the brain in the vat” . It's called a “thought experiment” because clearly a real-life experiment that involves extracting people's brains and keeping them alive and conscious in laboratories is unthinkable and undo-able. But that doesn't prevent us thinking about it. The classic brain in a vat questions are:

• How do we know we are not just brains in a vat, wired to receive virtual sensory experience of a virtual universe?

• If we are just brains in a vat then can we really know anything for certain? Of course we know what we believe to be true, based on our experience, but can we ever know if it is not all an illusion.

This also is not really an original question. It seems like a high-tech re-stating of Descartes question … how do we know that everything we experience is not just the product of an evil demon who systematically contrives to deceive us and control all our experience?

There have been answers to this problem over the years but none really satisfactory. Descartes' famous answer “I think therefore I am” is easily shown to be invalid. The lingering doubt on the issue has inspired a lot of fiction; the “Matrix” series comes to mind of course, and numerous other sci-fi oriented works. In human consciousness there has always been a running undercurrent of doubt about what is “real” and what is just a dream. Consider this Chinese story from the 4th century BC:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction!

I had a variation of this problem presented to me in an ethics course. If you could “plug-in” your brain (like in the Matrix ) and experience a completely convincing (but virtual) life of happiness and fulfillment, would you do it?

In all of these problems you have to unclutter yourself of the practical considerations like “What if there was a power failure?” or “Who are the beings that run this experiment?” Only the central core issue is under consideration, and it boils down to this --- Would you be satisfied with perfect happiness? Now I know you are going to say – No, because it's not real. But you have to accept the completeness of the illusion. Your happiness would be complete, which means by definition you could not be aware of any falseness or risk or impermanence. If you were, you would not be happy. Certainly you are aware of the falseness now, in your present state, but after you plugged in, you would not be in your present state. Or perhaps you would be completely aware of your “wired” situation, but perhaps the nature of the perfect peace that awaits you is – it doesn't bother you! Isn't that what peace of mind is? Seek not to change the world but choose to change your mind about the world (A Course In Miracles)

Moving on – the problem resurfaces in Huxley's Brave New World. In this utopian world, war and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy, thanks to a government provided medication: “Soma,” described in the book as having:

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects

Admittedly Soma is short-lived, has undesirable side effects, etc. But Huxley was writing social satire and fiction. He had to introduce the notion of the high cost of happiness to satisfy the morals of his readers. Let's not forget that Huxley was himself a great advocate of better living through chemistry in his writings about mescaline.

There is no qualitative difference between wiring our brain with electrodes to stimulate and simulate perfect happiness, and using chemicals to do the same thing. Neither is technologically possible at this time, but both can be interchanged in the thought experiment. So I ask again: if you could take one pill a month to create a state of perfect peace of mind, would you do it?

Let me address some doubts you may have. No the pills have no toxic side-effects. No, no-one will rob your house or rape your daughters while you are under the influence. No, your mortgage won't be foreclosed. No, your life will not be shorter – in fact as long as you keep taking the pills you will live forever. No you won't have to pay for them, ever. No, people won't think you're a junkie, everybody else will be taking them too.

You ask: who will run businesses? Who will fly planes? Who will grow crops? Who will educate our children? Who will pay the mortgage? What about Me ? What happens to me and who I am and my position and privileges in this world? You haven't grasped it yet. Who needs business, because who needs money? Who needs planes? Why fly anywhere when you are perfectly content right here? Who needs crops? Who needs food? You have perfect peace of mind. That must mean that hunger is not an issue. Food is a desire, and peace of mind and desire cannot co-exist. What is the point of education? Why should anyone want to better themselves if they are perfectly at peace. How can you be better than perfect? Mortgages? Houses? These things provide shelter and security don't they? But in a state of perfect peace, what need have you for security? There can be no such thing as insecurity. What is there to shelter from? As for you and your identity, you and your specialness are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Take the pill and feel them dissolve away, and become one with the universe. Perfect everlasting peace and happiness and contentment. Eternal Joy and love and oneness and brotherhood. Just one free pill a month.

If that's too much trouble – would you do it if it was just one pill a year? How about just one pill. Period. Ever. Why not? Too busy writing the mortgage checks? If you are at all like me you will experience a kind of moral disdain about the whole thing. It runs contrary to a deeply ingrained Calvinistic work ethic, it invokes a sense of “too good to be true,” and most of all it is impossible to see it as real . In other words it seems fake, phony, contrived. Even though we may be assured that once immersed in the experience it will be completely real, and all our present doubts or problems will be just a distant dream. We still resist it based on our present mindset. We still wonder if we will be only dreaming we are butterflies, but on some level know we are really still us. Or just the opposite -- that we will dream we are butterflies so convincingly we lose touch with the "real" us.

Think about your answer. Then think about the line from A Course In Miracles that says:

Knowledge is not the goal of this Course, peace is.

Now do you see where I'm going? This is a core concept of the Course. If I accept the pill of Jesus then I'm told all this earth and all my earthly cares melt away and become meaningless, and I will have perfect peace and happiness. But will it be real? Or is it just a pill. I've seen a lot of videos of pentecostal services where the congregation was clearly in a state of rapture. In my arrogance and superiority I have snickered at them, thinking how easily they are deceived, and they will wake up one day with a hangover and find the mortgage unpaid. But why is my Jesus any different? Why is my pill any different? Why is my brain-vat any different? And most importantly who is to say I am not already in that vat?

A big non-event.

2007-07-09T18:39:00.000-04:00

A rant: Another intergalactic event hijacked a populist cause last week. "Live Earth" was another Geldorf-style musical event, taking place in umpteen countries simultaneously, bragging endlessly about the scope and complexity of its global electronic hookups, and somehow wrapping itself around the theme of climate-change and global warming. I look at all those ancient rockers dragged out for another turn, and I wonder if anybody buys into this kind of flim-flam anymore. What? ... we are supposed to learn lessons in citizenship and ethics from Madonna? I've seen too many shots of puzzled peasants in Bangladesh wondering what the hell these long-haired old western geezers with guitars and personal-assistants had to do with their plight. Who benefits from these promotions? The promoters! They get to be knighted by the queen, and jet all over the globe, writing it all off. No this isn't argumentum ad hominem. I don't discredit Al Gore's cause because he has a jet and a high utility bill... the one has nothing to do with the other. Perhaps it is possible to raise awareness by spreading a little personal bad karma. What I discredit is the notion that anything of any significance in the external world can ever be changed. Period. There is only one thing that can ever be changed and that is my personal perception. When I am healed, the world is too. The problem is not the icecaps or the military industrial complex, the problem is me. The sooner I can accept that one problem - the only problem - has been solved for me, by a power gretaer than Bob Geldorf or Al Gore, the sooner we will all find peace.

The greatest temptation is to water down my own remarks. Allowances and exceptions leak and spray from my thoughts like water from a rotten hosepipe. We should be in the world but not of the world. That's a perennial favorite. Then there's the horrified liberal refrain: Surely you're not saying .... (fill in blank) ...? I say this to myself all the time. At the heart of all this tergiversation (I just wanted to work that word in somehow) is the sense of unease at the sound of my own anti-social voice. How can there be truth in anything that gives such offense? Do I simply want to sound controversial? Perhaps. I don't know how to explain it exactly: it's just that the only way to maintain a position that flies in the face of commonsense and experience is to adopt an almost militant position. It's like building the Hoover dam to hold back a harmless trickle. Trouble is: the trickle never stops, always grows, and becomes a mighty river that will wear you down and sweep you along. That approach really doesn't work I suppose. No man defends himself unless he perceives attack, and to perceive attack is to be an attacker. Ergo: I should stop thinking about it and talking about it, because it is yet another devious way to avoid doing it.

Today's forecast: widespread meaninglessness.

2007-06-27T19:20:00.000-04:00

These days I feel fragile like glass. Something in my molecular structure has changed and will never be the same again. I am quick to walk away from people and situations that bore me or annoy me -- and alas there seem to be plenty of both. I have no humor and no tolerance.
Everything hurts like a shattered eardrum. No one knows of the noise in my head, but it makes everything distant and unreal.

The world seems like what it is: an annoying temporary phenomenon, that everyone else takes seriously. It is not the world that pushes me to the brink, it is people's belief in it.

In years to come will they mark this as the time I began my decline? Before this: promising but eccentric, humorous but a little sociopathic, talented but without direction. After this time: disillusioned and moody, humorless and volatile, unfocussed and detached.

Reality gyrates between hostile and absurd. When it is hostile I strike back in a new and uninhibited way. When it is absurd I detach, alienating others who see it as vital, necessary, fascinating, challenging, beautiful, exilherating (fill in your own words).

I feel like I live in a Magritte painting. Everything has familiar elements but is vaguely threatening or downright ridiculous.

Here are two signs I photographed in London last week because they seemed significant. What are they trying to tell us?
.

What happens if you walk into this "Institute"? Are you surrounded by people who tell you they love what you've done to your hair? Do perfect strangers tell you they have heard such good things about you? No, wait, that's complimentary with an "i." So what goes on in this place? It boggles the imagination.

And this! A masterpiece of vague innuendo! Its meaning will be pondered by scholars for millions of years.

This world is a gossamer thin illusion made by others, for others, and I fear I shall rip it if I move too fast or shout too loud. Then they will take me away as a danger to myself and others.

Lord. All my friends (all two of them) want to cheer me up. I've been told to get exercise. I've been told my mother wouldn't like me to be sad. I hear these little chirrups from far far away, but I think it is not my life they are hoping to improve. I would like to help them, I really would - but there is not much we can do for one another at such a great distance.
.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
..... Virginia Woolf in the film "The Hours"

Funeral Service Over

2007-06-24T23:21:00.000-04:00

The cremation service was Friday morning at 10 am. Right after the summer solstice. It went smoothly but I don't feel like talking about it because it really is a rather private topic. I did stand up and acknowledge all who very kindly came to say godbye, including Jean, Nigel, Julian, Nava, Barbara, Sister Jennifer. Thank you all so much. I also specifically mentioned some people who I knew wished they could come, but couldn't make it. This included mother's friend Joann, who sent a poem, and her late sister Joyce, and my father Benjamin who passed away 50 years ago. Also many thanks to Golda who I know was saying prayers for mom, and to Chris who was doing likewise.
Also many thanks to all my friends and acquaintances in the US who sent email letters of support and sympathy.
Today Sunday I came home via Toronto, and wept most of the way. Glad the week is over; from where I stand it seems like just about the worst week of my life. Also glad to be out of London which seemed like a noisy, unruly, hateful place. I miss you, mom.

The Number 27 Bus

2007-06-07T18:58:00.000-04:00

Dear Mom,
I’m on the way to see you. I’ve discovered that the number 27 bus will bring me directly from Bayswater to Chiswick. It’s so much better and more convenient than the dingy catacombs of the underground. It is a classic bright-red double-decker London bus, updated a little since I was a young man. Now it is equipped with closed-circuit TV cameras and flat-screen color monitors. Now it has hydraulic doors that hiss like something from Star-Trek, whereas years ago there was just an open platform at the back, and I hopped on or off the moving bus with abandon, grabbing the big silver pole and swinging myself aboard like a gymnast. You always yelled at me for doing that. Once when I was young I was riding that back platform alone, on the way home from school, waiting for the next stop, which was home. I held my cheap fake leather briefcase. Inside were my books, and my silver Hohner chromatic harmonica – my expensive pride and joy – the Stradivarius of harmonicas. I played it pretty well for a kid of my age, too. Never a lesson: just intuitive. Did you buy that for me or was it dad? Anyway, I leaned way out off the platform, briefcase held high, flying in the wind. The bus hit a bump and the case slipped from my hand and plopped flat on the road behind us. Incredulously I watched it recede in the distance as our bus rumbled on. Two minutes later, we arrived at the bus-stop and I jumped off and sprinted back to the disaster-scene. My little brown brief-case grew steadily bigger in my field of view as I huffed and puffed toward it. I thought I was going to make it. Then first one car, then another, drove right over it, with a dull "plap-plap" sound. By the time I got to it and opened it, there was nothing inside but harmonica-roadkill. Instead of my shiny hi-tech German instrument there was only a dull stromboli-shaped slug. That’s "slug" as in the flat blank disks people use to try to fool coin-vending machines. I sat on the kerb and turned it over and over. I blew into it but only a sad squeak came out. When I got home I told you a story: "another kid pushed me and I lost my balance and grabbed at the pole but I dropped the bag and … " I guess when you are a kid nothing is ever your fault, especially when you hope to avoid a spanking. You didn’t spank me. However, you were mad at me for two days and two nights, which is worse in a way. You gave me two days of frosty silences and looks that could kill. You banged the plate of dinner down in front of me with a "don’t you dare complain about the cauliflower" thump. I think you felt a bit sorry for me, but it wouldn’t be in character not to be mad. Anyway, dad walloped me.
The bus is nudging through the streets of Bayswater, in west central London. I’m sitting upstairs (still a kid I guess) watching the changing neighborhoods from a princely height. My briefcase today contains my laptop and I grip it tightly – not because I could drop it on the road – open platforms have long since vanished – but because in this city there is a very real possibility of having your bag snatched. That’s something that would be alien to you, mom. Years ago when you used to take me all over London with you, in most parts of the city people did not walk in fear of robbery. You would set your big brown bag down in all kinds of places while you shopped or talked or ate – and no one paid the least attention. Do you remember a few years ago, I came to visit you at the home in Chiswick and it was all abuzz because one of your housemates had been strolling on the street when some young lad had roared by on a moped and snatched her purse? It was your first direct experience of petty crime – and you were a group of ladies in your eighties. It must say something about a city if you can live in it eighty years without coming face-to-face with crime. Since then of course the conversation at the house has been all tongue-clucking and "Ain’t it awful!" "The country’s gone to the dogs!" "You can’t walk down the street in peace anymore." "It’s all these foreigners, they’ve ruined everything!" – and more. I guess when you grow old, nothing is ever your fault.
But -- yes it sure has changed. They call it "Londonistan" nowadays. In some areas the Arab influence is so predominant you could easily imagine you were in Baghdad. All the faces are olive, all the hair black, all the signage is Arabic, all the restaurants are Halal, Arab music and merchandise spill out of the storefronts onto an unending sidewalk bazaar. From my bus-top perch I watch heavyset men, with their heavyset bejewelled wives or girlfriends, sitting at brass tables outside the "Cedars" café, sucking deep drafts of smoke from colored glass narghile. Walk down Edgware Road on any day of the week, and the steady burbling of a hundred hookahs and the soft fruity haze of tobacco will transport you to another land faster than any Royal Jordanian ticket.
I don’t think you’ve ever seen this face of London, mom. Your days of thrusting through the central city crowds are long gone. For years now you’ve has been quietly retired and growing gray in a west London suburb called Chiswick. Even this enclave, once quiet and far from the crowds has now become trendy expensive and desirable, and lined with Italian cafes and organic food groceries. But you don’t get out to see this. You can’t walk any more, and you never in your life owned a car. Really, you’ve no reason to go anywhere. You don’t know about the changed face of your city except for what I tell you and what you see on "telly."
I first came to live in Bayswater when I was just seventeen. It’s ironic I should end up here again, but this is where Hotwire.com deposited me in my search for an affordable hotel – an oxymoron in London. I want to tell you something – at seventeen years old I came here mostly as a statement of independence from you. I wanted to move out on my own, and be somewhere – anywhere -- radically different to the stodgy semolina-suburbs where I grew up. Like all young men with an infinite future, I had no use for the dull dross of high-streets and Sainsburys and pre-war semi-detached brick-boxes. Not I! I had myself a job at BBC Television. The Bebe! I was king of the world. I wanted my own place, my own life, my own style. I wanted to grasp the very beating heart of the world in my hopeful hands. As it turned out, being king meant living in a single room in Bayswater overlooking a train line, for $8 a week, and eating a lot of cheap spaghetti. My salary was a kingly $36 a week. As for the beating heart of the world in my hands I spent most nights with a dour Scottish buddy sitting dolefuly in a coffee bar grasping only a lukewarm cup, half empty, in my hands. I had not a grain of education, money, or self-awareness to my name. I was one of the faceless hordes of young disaffiliates who seem to populate London’s streets day and night, going nowhere, doing nothing, having no plans, just walking from place to place making a noise and taking up space. Even so, it suited my would-be bohemian instincts better than our four-room flat over a hairdressing salon back in the far suburbs.
The bus is leaving Bayswater and entering Notting Hill. In a blink the neighborhood character changes. Now we are in an upscale world of little brightly painted rows of shops nudging and jostling each other down tiny roads and alleys, sprouting flower-planters, ivy, roses, bric-a-brac and antiques of questionable authenticity, old books by the yard, brass hunting-horns, large purple giraffes, suits of armour, photo galleries, retro fashions, tiny pubs, art cinemas, and unlikely eateries. It’s the Portobello Road. I can’t ever remember you bringing me here … there was no "upscale" in those days. There was no "scale" at all. Your idea of a market was the vegetable market in Romford High Street on a Saturday afternoon. I liked to go there because it meant we would pass the Woolworth store and I could go in and ogle the toys --- "No you can’t!" you would say, and yank my arm whenever I asked to buy one. Then there was the even worse, much feared, "We’ll see…" (Yank.) However, one golden day I distinctly remember you took me to the High Street and didn’t even try to buy a vegetable. Instead, you delivered me straight to Woolworths and said, "Today is your day. We are just going to look at toys all day." I don’t remember if you bought me any or not – and it doesn’t matter. You didn’t yank once, and that was the kind gesture that stuck in my mind.
I know it is ungrateful of me to criticize that flat over the salon. It kept us alive. You were cast out unexpectedly into a hostile world when my father –your husband – died in 1954, leaving you with – not much. I was ten and a huge burden, but you did not cave in as other women might have. You did not go on welfare benefits or ask anyone for help. Before the war you had been a hairstylist, so now without missing a beat you found a salon for rent, with a flat above for us to live, moved us in, and with no experience at all of running a business, you opened up shop and hired two girls to help. The shop was named Maison Best – an ambitious blending of homely and exotic – and the two girls were named Beryl and Iris. I was highly in love with Iris. When she wasn’t there, I would sniff her nylon smock hoping to catch a whiff of her perfume. I was ten, she was twenty, but love can overcome anything. The salon prospered. It was always filled with old ladies with bluish hair sitting patiently under giant igloo-shaped driers reading magazines. I always had an endless supply of Reader’s Digests to read, from which I learned about a place called "America." At Christmas you installed me behind the cash drawer and taught me how to make change. I was the token child. The cash drawer was wooden with a bell that dinged when opened. I soon figured out how to open it without ringing the bell so I could steal sixpences and go next door to the candy store to stock up on Cadbury’s chocolate.
The bus roars and grinds on along Kensington High Street. How very different the hairstyling salons of today. There seem to be lots of them here, and I doubt they use wooden cash-drawers with bells. Today they strive to seem like anything but what they are. They evoke images of Dada-esque space-stations or pavilions rescued from some world’s fair. I can imagine you sitting beside me up here looking down at the thronging commerce of Kensington and saying; "I don’t know" with that unique emphasis on the "don’t." Girls with pink hair and pink boots float in and out of ultrachic beauty shops, mobile phones chattering. You would shake your head. You used to love Kensington High Street. You would drag me here all the time, trailing me from one behemoth department store to another. Many of those big old places seem to have gone now. The structures are still there, but they are gutted and filled with ubiquitous "Gap" and "French Connection" outlets, hip boutiques, feng shui shops, mobile-phone shops, Italian shoe stores, and "Starbucks" in indoor shopping centers. Forty or fifty years ago, the shopping crowd seemed older, more English, and more conservative. Now you seldom hear English spoken without a foreign accent, and you seldom see anyone over thirty. It overwhelms you really. When you’ve looked at the streets of this city an hour or so it all begins to look like a giant antheap. There is so much motion. What was it Tony Robbins used to say? "Motion creates emotion." The eyes defocus, the mind drifts off to another place. I stop watching the crowds, the cabs, the cafes the white georgian facades, leaning up to curve in on the close quiet sky --- the rooftops a-bristle with Mary Poppins chimney pots ready for a song … I stop reading the billboards, the store window ads, the ads on the backs of buses, the ads plastered along the inside of my bus – I just stop – mentally stopping the entire city – as if London itself was only a giant toytown, and now the big silver key has fully unwound and all around me is paused in suspended animation and I am free to step through it like a giant in my own silent time and space. But it is not really that the city has faded away… rather, I have faded from it. Other matters … other matters … other matters… beckon more strongly. This bus is going somewhere and me with it. This is not a random ride down memory lane. The closer I get to the end of the line, the more I think about what awaits.
Hammersmith. The Lyric Theater looms large ahead. The flyover to the left. Only the Brits give such strange spin to the concept of an overpass by naming it a "flyover." My favorite building – the boat-shaped Seagrams Building – presides regally over the flyover. The bus threads around the one way system, and in and out of the bus-station. People get off, people get on. More people get off. More get on. The younger and the more romantic clang noisily up the stairs and rush for the front seats giggling. They don’t interest me too much any more. I have that glassy feeling. I’ve spent a lot of time on buses. In the years after father died, you took to travelling around England on bus-tours. You took me with you of course. We went everywhere; every abbey, every monument, every forest, every air-show, every castle, every city, every lake, every mountain, and quite a few caves. I remember we collected thousands of 35mm slides in a big green metal box. We had a projector and I would insist on showing every single slide to my schoolfriends when they came to visit. After a while, I didn’t have too many friends. Do you remember the time we went on a car trip to Scotland with some man and his son? I don’t know who he was. I do remember it took several days and for some reason I became very excited about the prospect of going to Glasgow. Somehow I felt there was some kind of magic awaiting me there… as if the meaning of life lay in waiting … as if all the answers to all my problems could be solved by a single purchase from some little secret enchanted shop awaiting me in Glasgow. "What problems Derek?" I hear you ask disdainfully. What problems? I was just a kid! Ah but mother, my dear mother, don’t you know children are a secret seething nest of conflicts and uncertainties. Were you never a girl, mother? Did you never giggle and chew gum? Did you never have secrets, or stare at the rain from an attic window and dream of a wide world? In the car to Scotland I remember I asked out loud: "Do they have interesting shops in Glasgow?" You said: "I’m sure there are some." But you didn’t elaborate, you just stared out the car window. Then I said – to the man and his son in the front seats - "Does anyone intend to buy anything special in Glasgow?" You know, I was just a child trying to articulate a strange conviction. "Be quiet!!!" you shushed me immediately. "You don’t ask questions like that!" I just said "Oh," and sat sheepishly for a while, but to this day I’ve never understood what was wrong with that question. A couple of years ago I finally tried asking you about it but you thought I was crazy; you remembered neither the question nor the trip to Scotland.
You have never been comfortable with my attempts to learn about my own family history. You always say you are not "sentimental" and that is the impression many people get of you – ruthlessly unconcerned with your own life history or that of our far-flung family. But I’m not sure. I think you have built a personna of toughness – partly out of fear of revealing yourself and partly out of necessity. As life has gone by it has become easier simply to maintain that personna – to live up to the image you created. In effect you have invented yourself, and it has stuck. Now if there was ever anything beneath that, it has withered away; the toughness is the whole being. I dig for more sometimes. What is the strange compulsion we all have to prove to ourselves that tough people are not so tough, deep down? So I try -- but though I find humor, I find no sentiment. I find curiosity, but not about yourself. I find breadth, but not depth. It always goes just so far, and stops just short of actual contact.
It’s those moments of toughness – of obtuseness and unavailability that act as anchor-points in my memory just as much as the kind gestures in Woolworths. The ordinary, the everyday, the mundane, seems gone. There is no filler between the high notes of kindness and the low notes of rejection. Many times I can remember being shushed – "Be quiet Derek, you don’t understand anything about it!" At other times I can remember being unexpectedly rewarded, like walking on a beach and coming upon a shining jewel. Once, walking home from somewhere with you, you said unexpectedly: "When we get home we’ll build that model airplane you got last week." You had bought me a model kit the previous week and it had sat unopened in my room because I had not the least idea how to put it together. Your sudden offer to get involved was beyond all expectation. Usually you just sniffed at my model-making efforts and became angry about the mess. Suddenly you redefined yourself. That evening you gave me something to look forward to, but you also gave me a mother.
The bus is leaving Hammersmith. We pass the white block monoliths of the Olympia Exhibition halls. Right now there is a trade show about "Bulgarian Property Investment." Apparently you can buy property there for only $10,000 down. Strange, the things people do. Every year when I was young you brought me to a show here called the "Ideal Home Exhibition". I don’t know if they still hold it. I used to love it because you could stock up – fill your bags with free samples of sauces, relishes, pickles, candy, miracle cleaning products, calendars, tape-measures, pens, pencils, even a free flashlight with "Prudential" printed on the side. To me it was like Christmas. Truth be told -- at that young age I really had no concept where Olympia was in relation to our house, or how to get there, or what the show was really all about, or why anyone wanted to give me a flashlight. You don’t question these things – you follow your mom and they happen to you as paint happens to a canvas. You were living your life with me in tow, perhaps unaware each thing you did would paint another memory… so many brushstrokes …
Were you aware how terrified I was of the dark? At night I would lie alone in my room fossilized with fear. You used to love BBC television dramas, and would watch them a couple of nights a week. I could hear the TV droning distantly downstairs, and would catch the occasional phrase; meaningless adult stuff. I had no real sense of time; my head was swimming with terrors of impending harm from all kinds of faceless horrors. I knew you would come to see me when the TV play was over but that stretched ahead beyond any imaginable horizon. Long before then I was sure I would perish. At any moment I would die while my mom watched the Wednesday play
The big red bus pushes toward Chiswick High Street. There are posters everywhere for some kind of visiting carnival, which sets up each year on "the green" an area of trees and grass in the middle of the town, something like Boston Commons. Probably in a week or two there will be carousels and ferris-wheels and candy-floss. I would never have known this area and probably never have been here if it weren’t for you. After I moved to Canada and then subsequently the U.S. you moved to Aldershot for a while where you had another salon. I visited you there only once, (it was 1973,) and it seemed pretty much a clone of the first salon. Only the name was different – Jeanette’s. I really can’t remember much about the house, the shop, the town, or anything else. Memory plays strange selective tricks. The one thing I do remember was a really awesome hump-back bridge somewhere nearby. When you drove over it at speeds greater than 30mph it literally propelled your stomach up into your mouth. I loved it, but you would not drive with me unless I promised to go slowly. After that you went into retirement and went to live with your sister in Uxbridge for a few years. She has passed away now. Then you moved to Chiswick. You found a retirement home you liked and apparently you qualified to live there at very low cost, being a widow and having worked and paid taxes most of your life. In retrospect it was a typically tough decision. Not many people can effectively make decisions about their own declining years. Those who do usually make plans centered around family in some way. True to form, you asked nothing of me or anyone else. You just decided what was necessary, made arrangements, and moved ahead. And you loved it in that house. You all shared meals but you each had your own room. You could come and go as you pleased but there was a resident carer who lived in the house. When I say "house" I mean house. In the U.S. we think of these assisted-living places as giant apartment complexes, like palaces, but this was just an intimate little house, in a typical little row of houses on a typical little Penny Lane street. There was a pub and a grocery store on the corner and it was a short walk to the shops of the high street. For those who couldn’t walk, a bus went by the end of the street. London has no shortage of buses.
You were happy there. There was a feeling of family and you felt safe and content. There was no remorse, no regret, no longing for a life that might have been. This was your new self-directed situation. It did not happen to you, you chose it, you adapted, you bore it with strength and resolve and humor, and at the heart of it all you were still very much Muriel.
But it was in those years that I started to visit you from America more often -- the first time, after a gap of a few years. I remember that day. I waited in the hall, and you came slowly and carefully down the stairs to meet me, smiling. I fixed a fake smile of pleasure and recognition on my face, but inside I was shocked because the person coming down the stairs was not my mother – it was your mother. I suppose all those years you had been coloring your hair but now had decided to stop. With your hair white, you looked exactly like grandma – a lovely old lady whom I loved dearly. She lived to be 100 years old.
As a child it was a yearly ritual to go visit grandma. She lived as far south in England as it is possible to live – on a tiny island called the Isle of Wight. The trip involved a long train ride and a ferry-boat crossing. The island would loom up on the starboard bow, all bristling little church steeples and painted roofs. A long pier jutted out and the little steamer ferry docked at the end of it. We would climb the long hill of the high-street to Grandma’s house, a tiny cottage behind a catholic convent with high stone walls. Grandma would smile and cook and fuss. In the daytime we would go to the beach, and in the evenings we would do jigsaw puzzles and sleep in the big brass bed. I wonder now what you talked about with your mother on those long summer evenings. Two women, both widowed, and me. The past, the present, the future…
So I first came to Chiswick to find you transforming into your mother. That was the Christmas I took you out for a night on the town. I rented a car and took you to the Royal Festival Hall to see the Nutcracker ballet. I recall you sat perfectly happy and enchanted, waving your hand just slightly in time to the music. I wanted to take a photograph but an overweight usher lady rushed up and said it was not permitted.
Now the 27 bus deposits me once more in Chiswick and I begin the ten minute walk to see you. How many times have I made this walk now? The route goes down the length of a pretty little street. There are a few antique stores and trendy restaurants at one end. (Nepalese food, for God’s sake!) There are unending rows of little brick pre-war houses with handkerchief-size gardens, blooming with lavender and roses, privet hedges and hollyhocks. Make no mistake, even the smallest of these houses is probably about $900,000 at today’s bizarre London prices. Normally I would steal a few sprigs of lavender for you and buy a newspaper to read to you. Today I don’t.
You are no longer in the same house now. After many happy years there, the British government decided to rewrite all the rules for elder care, essentially making it impossible for such houses to meet care and safety standards. They had to close down. Lots of elderly men and women all over England found themselves out on the street with nowhere to go. You were luckier. You qualified for a room in a local Anglican convent, which also operated as a nursing home. It’s an interesting place; all rambling old corridors, weatherbeaten red bricks, tile roofs, green lawns, big shady trees, secret flower gardens, a chapel, giant black iron gates, lots of nuns in gray habits floating around like ghosts, one cat, and one big fat dog.
It is literally across the street from the historic house and grounds where artist William Hogarth, the father of English painting, used to live. Old Hogarth is honored in Chiswick high street by a life-size bronze statue of him and his dog. He wears an artist’s beret and smock and holds his palette and brushes. He stares across the street and seems to be forever sizing up the Caffe Nero for a new canvas. You were quite adamant about your opinion of the convent; you despised it from the beginning. The move seemed to upset your whole equilibrium – you claim everything was lost, broken, or stolen. Your possessions had been slowly shrinking over the years anyway, and the few sticks of furniture you owned were important to your sense of self. "All broken," you stated flatly, moaning over and over again for months that things were "just an awful mess." You didn’t care for the other residents, they were all "stupid." You didn’t care for the administrative staff, they didn’t "give a damn." You hated the carers because they were all "stealing" from you. To me they all seemed hardworking and professional. You didn’t like the way you weren’t allowed to make your own tea and have your own cakes in your room. Mostly you hated that you had to walk so far to the dining room. It was downstairs, and every day at lunchtime you wobbled your way painfully to the lift, then slowly along the long hallway. You were losing the use of your legs, as arthritis rose like rot in your limbs. You were also losing your sight, your hearing, and most of the feeling in your hands. What was left? Ah, mother… you are such a strong woman, and losing your independence must be the hardest thing to accept. You fell a couple of times and banged your head, which didn’t help your vision or hearing. At one time, I could talk to you fairly well on the telephone, but for the last two years, as your deafness overtook everything, that has been impossible. Of course you would never admit that, and always blamed me for failed phone calls: "I don’t know what’s the matter with your phone!" you would say confidently, "It keeps fading in and out!" When you get older nothing is ever your fault.
I must admit, dear mom, I knew things were changing radically when I came to see you last summer. You kept telling me about your son, Derek, in America, and an icy hand brushed my heart as I realized you were no longer really there with me, and maybe never would be again. It seemed so recently we had been tackling the Times crossword, or watching Wimbledon on TV together. When I left to return to the States you told me quite bluntly to come back soon because you felt you did not "have much longer". I did what all sons do when their parents say such things: I said, "don’t be ridiculous, you will live forever." Was that reassurance for you or for me? I don’t think I wanted to contemplate the possibility of an England without you. For all my ambivalence, you have been the front and center of my thoughts every time I think of England. Whether fondly remembering you or despairing of your stubbornness it is still you who are the pivot and anchor around which all thoughts and memories revolve. If you were not there – how would I define myself? With no-one to attach my memories to, what would become of my life? Just memory itself? Mere spirit…? A rustle of wings, a flight of fantasy, a fleeting image in a pre-dawn mist? "All those memories lost in time …" says a character in Blade Runner contemplating the end of his life, "... like teardrops in the rain."
Twenty years in a chair, sitting morning and night, shifting your arthritic legs this way and that, drinking endless cups of tea and munching on illegally smuggled cakes. Sleeping fitfully in that chair, refusing to lie in your bed because it was too painful for your legs. Everything you had or ever needed arrayed around that chair within reach – TV remote here, big brown purse here, telephone here although you cannot hear a word on it, hot water here, magnifying glass here, yogurt here, half your teatime sandwich saved and wrapped here – "no egg! I can’t stand egg!" A shrinking world of little routines, diminishing weekly like your increasingly frail body. You resisted all attempts by everyone, even me, to get you out of that chair. Years ago, I used to offer to take you around the grounds in a wheelchair – but no. No interest whatsoever. You did not want to be paraded around on display like those other "musem creatures." What started as a choice soon became an axiom: "I don’t do that!" … and that was that.
Three months ago, I came to see you and it was no longer like visiting my mom. The tough, good humored queen of Chiswick was completely gone. The person who had been a part of my life, the reason for my life, had gone. A frightened, withered, pained old lady still sat steadfastly in that chair, but if it was you, your face showed no signs of recognition when I came in. All your thoughts and comments were about your pains and your problems. You didn’t understand what was happening to you. You had not a single question about me or how I was, or how long I was staying. Now your mind wandered in and out of time freely – lost in time – rearranging the day constantly. You repeatedly said you had to put your shoes on to go for lunch, even in the late evening. I would put your shoes on your feet for you: big comfortable slippers I brought for you, and you would scream "Ow! Ow! Ow! Get them off! They hurt!" Your poor legs were swollen beyond belief, ulcerated and bound like a mummy. Off the shoes would come, but a minute later you would insist on putting them on, because any minute they would be coming to take you for lunch. So the hours went. I told you constantly I was Derek, your son, come from America to see you. Mostly you did not hear me, but when you did you just said "Who?" Then at last, one time, as you drifted off into a sleep, I think I got through to you. I put my arm round your bony shoulders, and my mouth right to your ear (there was a faint smell of talcum powder) and I said slowly, "Mom, it’s me, Derek." You seemed to register it. You raised your head and looked at me with sightless eyes, then dropped it to one side with fatigue. You said, "Derek? Thank goodness for that," and I too thought – thank goodness for that.
Each step down the little Chiswick street is heavy. I’ve made this journey a hundred times before and thought I knew it well. If that is true, today I no longer seem to know it. The character of the street is transformed. For the first time it is alien, hostile, lacking in charm. Perhaps I am the alien. The street is quiet, as though watching me like a suspicious stranger. At different times on different occasions, I have experienced many different emotions on the way to see you. Sometimes I would be bounding with the joys of spring, arms full of daffodils, heart full of stories to tell you. Sometimes in the gloom of winter, I would be sleepy, morose, resentful, wishing I did not have to make this trek on this day, feeling I had nothing to share or give at this time. But always I felt validated, purposeful, like a king on his own estate. What power would dare stand between a man and his mother? Today this is not so. Today I move in a closed world of inevitability, like a blood-clot moving through a dull gray vein. At the end of it, I know I will find you. Each day this week I have known I would find you – but in what condition? Ever since the convent called me in the middle of the night a week ago, and told me they feared for your condition … that is the call every son and daughter hopes never to get. There was a brief blur of transatlantic night-flights and hotels, then – once again – this familiar street. Then there was you.
Oh, mother, my mother, what has time done to you? Lying down now at long last, the agony from your calcified legs and hips dulled by morphine, your legs bandaged with massive tape, like an elephant. You are a stick insect, a brittle spindly shrunken vestige of a woman, lolling and moaning, feebly trying to raise yourself up a few inches before collapsing, muttering, refusing all food, bony hands pawing at the air, chest heaving, mouth open, gray eyes half open seeing nothing, nothing, not even me. At one time, you coughed and gurgled and suddenly your mouth was spilling dark red blood all over the sheets; life gushing out like a river. To see you this way is more than I can bear. I have to believe some part of you is no longer in that wreck of a body but now is in the room, in the air, watching the proceedings with amusement. I have sat with you holding your hand for hours, for days, sometimes talking to your shriveled frame, sometimes just in silence punctuated by your murmurings – senseless half-thoughts. Once you said, "I don’t want to wake up…" another time you suddenly said you wanted a glass of wine. I bent down to your ear and asked you "Red or White?" "Red" you answered angrily, as though that should have been obvious. It took me a minute before I realized perhaps you could hear me. So I quietly told you what a good life you’d had, and what a good job you’d done raising me, and how we could both be proud of each other. It was just a whisper. If someone had been sitting six feet away they could not have heard me, but I like to think you – who have heard virtually nothing for years – heard me perfectly. I told you there was no need to stay here any longer. You could let go. You could depart whenever you wanted. You would still always be with me in spirit. I knew you loved me, and I loved you.
There was no response of course, but who’s to say you didn’t hear everything? I left at six last evening and told you I’d be back this morning. "I love you mom," I said again. You must have heard something because you answered with one loud clear word: "Yes."

I got the call this morning from the convent that you had passed away. The long arc of your life is complete. This final journey to Chiswick is to say goodbye and it is the hardest journey I have ever made. Believe me, when goodbye is the reason for your journey, everything does seem different. Part of me desperately wants to turn back. No son or daughter wants to face a parent’s lifeless body, where yesterday there was life however frail. I don’t know how to feel or what to expect. All I know is; a great lady has left, an era has passed into history, and my life will never be the same. I will sit with your cold body for a while and say my farewells and thank-you’s. I won’t have any idea what to say, but I think you will forgive me. Say hello for me to your sister. And to dad, please. You are at peace now, and free of pain for the first time in twenty years. So now I too have been freed of your pain. Now the memories take over mom… You have given me plenty and I am grateful. I know the happy ones will endure. All the others were just momentary and will fade ...

… like teardrops in the rain.

Who gets what?

2007-04-21T20:27:00.000-04:00

©photo copyright Disney Corp.

This little puzzle was part of an economics course. It's supposed to teach something about game-strategy. I guess it does. First of all, can you solve it? It's not too hard. Leave your answer in a comment. Second: what ACIM principle does it demonstrate?

Mickey and Goofy have $100 to divide between them. Donald is there also, but just to help.
Mickey will propose a division of the money to Goofy.
Goofy can accept or reject the proposal. If he accepts, they split it, and that's the end of it.
If Goofy rejects it, Donald will take away $10, leaving $90. It is then Goofy's turn to make an offer to Mickey, about how they should split the $90.
If Mickey accepts Goofy's proposal, they split the $90, and that's the end of it.
If Mickey rejects Goofy's proposal, then Donald takes away another $20. This will leave $70.
At this point Mickey and Goofy will each get $35. This will end it.

How will this end? Who will get how much? Why? What proposal should each make?

Thinking about Sisyphus

2007-04-16T09:41:00.000-04:00

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

Thus does Camus state what he sees as the core dilemma of life, famously invoking the Greek myth of Sisyphus to illustrate his point. Without elaborating too much here on what is doubtless well-known to the reader: Sisyphus was an opportunistic and rascally character, a kind of Homeric version of Tom Jones, who incurred the wrath of the gods, and was sent to the underworld. Nonetheless he tricked his way out and back into the land of the living, where he enjoyed many more years under the warm sun. Finally Mercury himself came to collect Sisyphus and like the modern bounty hunter, led him forcibly (and irrevocably) back to Hades, where his punishment awaited him.

It is the nature of that punishment that seems to strike such a chord in readers throughout the ages. Poor Sisyphus was condemned to push a huge heavy rock up a mountain for all eternity. Whenever he achieved the summit, the rock would roll down to the bottom and he would have to begin all over again.

This is quite literally the stuff of which myths often seem made: a tragic irony of epic proportions. The act of completing the Herculean task renders it instantly undone, and there is no choice but to start again. Completion and satisfaction seem forever unattainable, and there is neither rest nor escape.

To say myths seem made of this or that is perhaps to presume a standard formula. What exactly is meant by "myth"? Is there a formula, or are there properties that are common to all myths? In modern usage the word has come to mean an untrue but widely held idea. When we say for example that the sunken city of Atlantis is just a myth, we assert that it does not really exist, despite persistent stories to the contrary. On a lesser scale, when people recite the common belief that "lightning never strikes the same place twice," that too is a myth – for lightning can and often does.

Falseness alone however, is not sufficient to make a myth. If it were, then I could tell you I have a hundred million dollars in the bank and that would automatically be a myth. It is not a myth: just a falsehood. It is simply untrue, meaning that the property of untrue-ness is not by itself mythic. As already argued, the idea, although false must also be common currency. Sometimes (as in the case of "creation" myths for example,) it may be based on a truth or truths that have been obscured by the years or by the millennia, and may now be beyond authentication or refutation. More importantly, a myth usually serves a cultural purpose, allegorizing a particular aspect of the human psyche, or symbolizing or iconizing deeply rooted motifs. Atlantis may or may not be real, but a part of our human dynamic seems to need the concept of a lost greatness that will one day return to awaken us from our mediocrity. Even the humble lightning myth is more than simple pseudo-science. It tells us there is a possibility of respite from life’s savagery – that there are safe havens in the direst of storms, and we can be sure of some order in the chaos. Thus even if a myth has no basis in truth, it is still a fable that springs from the living human heart, with all its concomitant fears and yearnings, and is always sure to bear the trademark imprints thereof.

If the content of myths is always a reflection of human nature, the form is more varied. Nonetheless, there are similarities among the more enduring myths. Larger than life characters and circumstances prevail, just as they do today on the screens of Hollywood. In fact, a good case can be made that film screen heroes are just the latest in a long lineage of myths. The late Joseph Campbell, considered by some to be an authority on mythology, postulates something called the "monomyth," which is really a kind of Jungian archetype or template for all myths:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Joseph Campbell: Hero with a Thousand Faces

As can be seen in Sisyphus, not all myths have such happy outcomes, but certainly all myths involve "a region of wonder" which seems somehow greater than what we think of as everyday reality, and there is usually a struggle or conflict between the central character and the forces or characters found there. Victory is not always won; Icarus for example discovered this to his detriment. But win or lose, a lesson for all eternity is usually implied. This format seems to hold equally true whether we think of Odysseus standing up for his men against Polyphemus in The Odyssey, or Marshall Kane (Gary Cooper) standing up for his town and his conscience against Frank Miller in High Noon, or Frodo Baggins defending the race of men against Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

Returning to Sisyphus, the struggle is in the plotting and trickery performed by Sisyphus as he repeatedly outwits the gods themselves ... the "fabulous forces" in Campbell’s terms. If there is a "decisive victory" for Sisyphus though, it is short-lived. He eventually gets what Booth Tarkington called his "come-uppance," and thus begins his famous punishment. Indeed a common motif in mythology, particularly Greek mythology, is the idea of knowing one’s place, or being taught it in the most unforgiving way. Thus, as mentioned earlier, did Icarus fall, because he aspired to the heights of the gods. Both Icarus and Sisyphus and many others were guilty of hubris, the sin of pride or overconfidence; a lack of humility – a failure to know their "place". The axiom that "pride comes before a fall" can be largely traced back to Greek myth, in which the goddess Nemesis always extracted swift and merciless retribution on all mortals arrogant enough to try to compete with the Gods.

However, not to put the cart before the horse, it is wrong to conclude that the myth came first and the moral axiom followed as a consequence. Any stories about hubris and Nemesis may be just that – stories, but the ideas for which they serve as metaphor pre-dated them and served as inspiration. They were and still are an underlying aspect of humanity. Just as those stories of Atlantis reveal our deeply buried hopes and beliefs, so too do stories about Sisyphus. However, it is not Sisyphus’ hi-jinks or victories that form the core of any lasting message … it is his punishment.

The myth itself stops where the punishment begins. We know nothing of Sisyphus’ actual travails in Hades, except the nature of the endless thankless task prescribed for him. Perhaps it is this "cutaway," this tantalizing trick of leaving it to the imagination that has engendered so much interest and speculation. We are free to see in it whatever is most meaningful to us, and seemingly, what is most meaningful is the manner in which repetitiveness, futility, dreariness, absurdity and emptiness define the human condition.

This element of absurdity is the basis for Camus’ use of the myth to illustrate his essay on the plight of modern man. Camus observes that we usually feel some sense of possibility, purpose, and progress in our lives, which motivates us to continue the daily struggle. However should we ever become cursed with the ability to perceive the true futility of it all, any sense of purpose would disappear and we would see ourselves as simply tragic and absurd. In that event, life is meaningless and the only possible rational response is suicide.

So Camus draws a line separating those who are aware of the futility from those who are not. In this division lies hope for modern man. As long as we remain on the side where eventual success is unquestioned, we can maintain our sanity – and our lives – intact.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious ...
... The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus.

Is Camus indulging in a type of self-deception, or at least a type of myopia? If the only saving grace in absurdity is the hope of success, what becomes of the protagonist without that hope? Can Sisyphus experience the luxury of hope? Remember that his punishment was for all eternity. There is no hope that the situation will ever change or improve. He might perhaps try to cast a positive spin on his situation and see his fate as a continuous stream of successes – each time he crests that summit. But each success must seem more empty and pointless than the last as the great stone tumbles back to its starting place leaving no evidence whatever of any achievement. Even that might be bearable; for there are many repetitive acts we all perform which may be enjoyable in themselves, but which leave no lasting trace: exercise, for example, or even eating dinner. The difference is that these activities serve a purpose, however slight or fleeting, while the movement of the rock up the mountain serves none. Nothing of any consequence is changed. There is no achievement of any kind. It is truly pointless, and Sisyphus must know this. What can he hope for? What can he rejoice in? He does not even have death as a final option – being already in Hades. This is the final option: "eternity" means what it says. It does not end. There is no subsequent resolution.

What of modern man? Is his dilemma so different? It is tempting to think of modern prisoner work details as an analogy to the Greek myth. Daily hard labor breaking up big rocks into smaller rocks is similar to Sisyphus’ plight, particularly since the work is pointless and thankless, the supply of big rocks is infinite, and the job is never done. In fact, a little searching on the internet quickly reveals several cases of prisoners who – having been sentenced to hard labor – committed suicide in their cells rather than face the futility of it. There are two distinct kinds of hard labor, which are qualitatively different. One, as already described, is purely futile and punitive (sorry: "rehabilitative"). This is labor of the rock-breaking type. The other seems similar at first glance and is equally backbreaking work. It involves working on road-building, track-laying, or trench-digging types of projects. The word "projects" is the giveaway; these tasks have a purpose or an end-goal, other than merely to punish. The task itself has a life cycle. From the perspective of the convict this may have no relevance. If the cycle of one project is completed, another will just take its place. His daily existence seems as punishing and meaningless as that of the rock-breaker. Or does it? In an interesting novel: "Cool Hand Luke" by Donn Pearce (later a movie with Paul Newman) the hero (Luke) inspires his fellow inmates to work with great enthusiasm on the chain gang. They actually exceed their daily quotas, and work with tremendous gusto and energy – to the dismay of the prison authorities who prefer them to suffer.

What happened in this case? How were men able to display such vigor and passion for such a Sisyphean punishment? The answer lies in the men’s perception of their situation. Camus states that the fate, which befalls Sisyphus, was:

"… that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing …"

For Donn Pearce’s convicts however there were three elements of their dilemma which differed from that of Sisyphus. First: they were only imprisoned for a finite period. In some cases this period was many years, but even this is considerably less than eternity. Every day they worked brought them one day closer to the end of their labor; and they all knew this.

As for myself, what can I say? I too have committed my crime, the one which demonstrated my hostility toward this great big wonderful world of ours; the one which has put me in debt to society and which I am gradually paying off, on the installment plan.
Don Pearce: Cool Hand Luke

Any man who works with an attainable goal in mind, and sees it getting closer is, by definition, not indulging in futility, at least in his own mind.

Second: the work itself had goals. The roads to be laid were not endless and the quotas, though brutal, were not infinite. At a certain point, a road would be complete and would begin to serve a purpose. Once more, if a man can see a purpose in his own mind, he can feel a degree of motivation.

Third: even thirty years of backbreaking work can be broken up into finite segments. What Luke did for his men was make them forget the long-term horizon, stretching away into infinitely depressing distances. Instead, he was able to stoke their zeal for short-term goals and closer horizons. By concentrating on the sheer pleasure of achieving the achievable, day-by-day, and ignoring the unthinkable, he found a way to bring some joy into a bitter landscape.

Yes, this was only fiction, but it was based on real life experiences. We should remember that Sisyphus is also fiction. In neither case does it matter. What matters is the underlying truth the fiction reveals to us about the human heart. Is there hope for Sisyphus in this? Can we picture him as Camus did; filled with the daily joy of simply doing the allotted task to the best of his ability, and rejoicing in the sheer quality and love he brings to his mundane existence?

Unfortunately not; the one element he had to contend with which faces no modern prisoner – was the length of his sentence. Eternity cannot be subdivided. No fraction of it is an attainable goal. Any fraction of it is also eternity. There is no mental trickery that can make it seem less, nor any attitude that can seem to make it pass more quickly. Even if he were completely deluded about his own situation, that too would pass with the passing of the eons. All things would pass. The only thing that would not pass is his continuing plight. No short-term measures could have any impact upon the long-term, and no long-term measures could have any impact upon the infinite. Neither rejoicing nor hope have any permanent place in the lexicon of eternal futility, and he being aware of this, could have no temporary place either. Sisyphus’ dilemma utterly and completely defines hopelessness.

So we return to the question: what of modern man? Does the myth serve to express a basic quandary of modern life? Are we all on a treadmill of futility, which, if realized for what it is, would justify mass suicide? Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote "Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom." A popular bumper-sticker states "Life’s a bitch. Then you die." Is this the truth exemplified in Sisyphus? We can perhaps see why this conundrum found such favor with the French existentialist movement, in the person of Camus. The whole idea is a kind of hopeless Gallic shrug: a secular gesture of dismissal of all possibility through a blue haze of Gauloises smoke, amid a clatter of empty demitasses. To the existential mind, chaos and entropy are the only lasting truth. Everything else is illusory and fleeting, bubbling for a few brief moments out of meaninglessness to hold our attention with false promises of relief from drudgery, until each bubble bursts or subsides into nothing – its true nature. Certainly there is no point in striving if all is temporary and illusory. Men, along with the greatest of man’s edifices and achievements will all soon enough be dust.

The function of the myth is to awaken us to a way of seeing, but not necessarily the way. It is necessary to be aware of a problem before we can begin to solve it, and mythical insights are often insights into what we perceive as the characteristics that hold us back or cause us to fail. Given sufficient irony we often decree the obstacles to change insurmountable, or too fundamental to be overcome; we accept the myth as a truism and do not look beyond, like the old mapmakers, who marked the edge of the known world with the legend "hic sunt dracones" – here there be dragons.

Certainly each of us must find our own path to a life of meaning, and how to do that is beyond the scope of this short essay. One fact is beyond dispute: into each life, meaningful or otherwise, death must come. If we accept the nihilist viewpoint, then death is only the absurd final curtain of an absurd play.

In this writer’s humble opinion, to succumb to that notion is to abdicate from faith. Such issues are clearly not the precinct of the original myth. For poor Sisyphus, life had been sweet – it was the afterlife itself that was the problem. We would do well to remind ourselves that strictly speaking the myth says nothing adverse about life as we commonly understand it. Looked at in a different light it may even be urging us all to do as its hero did, by finding whatever happiness we can, and rejoicing in the time we have in the sun.

-- end --

Where are you Derek?

2007-01-16T08:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry to have abandoned this space for so long. I wanted to write a couple of paragraphs about something important to me, but in trying to clarify it I got involved in a long train of thought about some very fundamental issues. The more I thought about it, the more elusive the answers became. Some days I would go to this web page with the intention of starting a piece, and realize I still didn't have the faintest idea how to explain it, because I really did not understand it myself. In fact I still haven't resolved it, and doubt I ever shall. But now I am back in college full-time, as well as trying to run the business, plus maintain my other web-pages. If there is such a thing as spare time, I'm sure I don't know where one would find it. So I apologize for not being able to write here for a long time, but please don't give up on me OK?

Are You Serious?

2006-10-29T16:00:00.000-05:00

Someone contributed a comment about my last post which perhaps deserves a post of its own. This is what it said:

I have been reading the Q and A section that you provide, well done. However, in one question you answer by stating that the Gospels are unreliable, yet Helen and the Course are reliable. Are you serious? Please tell me that you don't think that only Helen can be inspired. Please tell me that you think the apostles, who traveled and live with Jesus are not less reliable than the Course. To be honest, even while studying the Course, I still only see the "dialogue" of Jesus as a metaphor. I highly suspect that any actual "dictation" actually took place. The fact that you seem to want to disparage the long standing accounts in favor of your own makes the Course suspect to me... Anonymous. (Empasis added)

Dear Anonymous: First, please let me clear up something. I am the webmaster for the FACIM Question-and-Answer website, but that does not mean that I write the answers, and it does not necessarily mean I agree with them. The metaphysics of the Course takes us into uncharted territory where the likelihood of a perfect consensus is small. In this case however I do agree with the answer. You seem to be experiencing some conflict about this issue. It is as if you very much want to embrace a new idea, but are unwilling to do so because it would violate other dearly held beliefs. I notice the "Tell me it ain't so" structure of your comment.

It may well be that the bible and traditional Christianity are the best path for you. The Course is not for everyone, and it makes no sense to anguish over its perceived inadequacies if another way works better for you. The same underlying message of love is the basis for many different spiritual practices. This is one case where the destination, not the journey, is important.

It is actually quite common to encounter people who have a problem with the credibility of the Course because it attempts to correct (and frequently contradicts) traditional Christian teachings. A lot of the questions on the website are about just this issue, which seems to keep cropping up no matter how often it is discussed. It is important to note that sometimes (not always) this can be a sign that the student is starting to adapt to the new thought system, since no-one defends themself against a threat they do not perceive as real. If a student finds himself defending his established way of thought, it is possible the newer ideas are starting to seem valid to him.

In all compassion, one cannot and should not make light of this confusion. In Judeo-Christian cultures we are raised with a firm and authoritative world-view from our earliest formative years. This is not a matter of lifestyle or taste, like preferring Coke over Pepsi, or classical music over jazz. People can change their tastes in soda or music without a major crisis -- but it is much harder to change fundamental convictions about who we are and where we come from. Imagine if I asked you to change your beliefs about who your parents are. I am sure you would tell me I was crazy, because you "know" what you "know" to be "true". For many people, the fundamentals of Christianity are the unshakeable ingrained kernel of what is "true". It's what they "know". Everything else must be twisted to fit. Not to get too sidetracked -- but with the creationism issue for example, we see the tremendous power of what is "known" overruling all evidence to the contrary.

In our culture and in our very language, the word "gospel" is synonymous with "truth". How can the truth not be inspired? So how can the gospels not be inspired?

Well of course they are inspired. As a matter of fact I was driving on a long highway trip just yesterday and my car radio found a Christian station which was broadcasting a bible reading of Luke: 7, 8, and 9. It was fresh, riveting, relevant, and (for me) deeply moving. It was inspired! But a nagging thought ran through my mind... Was it moving because it was inspired, or was it inspired because it was moving? Don't dismiss that question as pedagogical too quickly. I think we all have favorite works, or poems, or songs, or stories that simply cut through all the layers of crap and reach us on a core level, bringing tears to our eyes or a shudder to our body, with a profound sense of having uncovered the naked soul and brought us face to face with an eternal truth.

For devout Christians the gospels always have that power. For instance:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.

For devout Muslims it is the Koran that has the same effect:

Do not say, that if the people do good to us, we will do good to them; and if the people oppress us, we will oppress them;
but determine that if people do you good, you will do good to them; and if they oppress you, you will not oppress them.

For Taoists it might be "The Way" of Lao Tse

Respond to anger with virtue. . .

... and so on. Or there need not be any religious association at all. Some people are profoundly inspired by Aristotle, or by Brahms, or by Carvaggio, or John Cage, or Henry Moore, or Maya Angelou. There is a way into any subconscious past any defenses. It is simply more likely to be carved out during formative years ... that's why they are called formative. So to come back to your comment, and your question -- can only Helen (Schucman) be inspired? No of course not. Whoever or whatever has the power to reach you and feel like core truth is inspired, including Helen in my case, and also including the gospels. This is if we accept the definition of "inspired" as being "able to speak the truth to us on a profound level. Since the exact color, flavor, or language can vary, it is obviously the message that matters, not the packaging. The Course clears this up near the beginning with the well-known words:

A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary

Think of the theology as the packaging or "form", and the experience as the message, or "content", or more simply "truth". To re-phrase this a little: "No matter how it is delivered, the truth must always be the same."

But with respect: what seems to cause you some anxiety is your definition of the word "inspired". If I understand your comment correctly, you feel that "inspired" means the physical source of the message must be directly attributable to Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the new testament would be inspired if the words were handed down directly from the mouth of Jesus (via various scribes, apostles, oral re-tellings, and translations). Helen's words could not be inspired because she obviously never met Jesus of Nazareth and she never knew anyone who did meet him.

In this sense you are technically right, but that rightness comes with some problems. First and foremost: by definition you are saying that the Koran - the words of the prophet Mohammed - is not inspired. Likewise, nor is the Talmud, nor is the Book of Mormon, nor the Bhagavad Gita, nor any other so-called "holy book." To get around this you would have to re-define "inspired" to mean - having come "from God" in some way. Jesus is presented in the gospels as being the son of God, thus he spoke for his Father, thus his words were obviously "inspired", however God also spoke directly to Mohammed, so the Koran is inspired too. He also spoke directly to Moses, so the ten commandments are inspired, and so on... All "holy books" might be said to have originated with God and reached us through some divinely chosen voice or scribe.

But that of course would also allow the Course to be "inspired". I do not see how you can have it both ways.

It does not "prove" the Course was inspired, of course. Helen could have made the whole thing up as you imply. For that matter so could Moses. Those who knew Helen felt her to be completely sincere and without any motivation to do such a thing. Her struggle spoke for itself. But let us assume the worst: let us assume that one day Helen conceived an idea to write a fictitious spiritual book, which would occupy her the rest of her life and for which she would receive no material reward. Suppose she did make it up as she went along. Suppose her local hairdresser told her what to write. Suppose her dog told her what to write. Or suppose, more realistically that she wrote whatever came into her head. Does this mean the words were not "inspired"? As a Christian you surely believe that God is the ultimate author of Heaven and Earth? God could speak to Helen (or Helen's dog) as surely as God could speak to Mohammed or Jesus or Moses ... or Beethoven or Mozart or anyone else with seemingly divinely inspired abilities. Did Mozart hear God? We can never know. If he were here today he would probably say he heard "music" ... but that may be how he heard God. Helen said she heard an "inner dictation," and perhaps that is how she heard God. No, you may say, she heard nothing. It was all an invention. But It is a challenge to understand how we can invent anything without first conceiving it and manifesting it in our minds, and there is no reason to believe we are the sole agent of that process.

Similarly, there is no reason to think that God should take a particular form - such as the spoken word. Do we really think God has a mouth and a larynx, and speaks English? Or do we really believe God is a great piano and came to Mozart in the form of concertos? Are we not in a sense limiting our own creator? This kind of thinking is called anthropomorphization (thinking of "Him" as a being with human or superhuman motives and characteristics). Indeed that is one of the major problems for those coming to the Course from traditional Christianity: they tend to interpret the word "God" in just this way, because that is the concept the Church tends to instill, and they think that what the Course is teaching is that God is still a "father", however not a wrathful vengeful disciplinarian father, but a kind, loving father, who wants us all to go home and be happy together in his nice house. Initially, this kind of metaphor is necessary, to understand the corrections to Christianity the Course would have us learn. But as we move away from the need for comforting human-like entities, and neat divisions of mind into little flow-chart boxes, we reach the deeper levels of pure un-utterable beingness where all form is unmanifest and only love exists. We say God is, and then we cease to speak. "We" has no more meaning.

Personally I think it is highly likely that people like Jesus of Nazareth and probably others have naturally understood this, and have had (if you will pardon the expression) only one foot in this illusion. I feel that the gospels were well-meaning attempts to record the life and circumstances of an extraordinary man... but a man nonetheless. The underlying principles the man represented and the manner in which he taught them are beyond words. There are metaphysical mysteries here we may never understand until we reach our own atonement. Nonetheless it is what he symbolized, not who he was that is the true message. A modern day book inspired by "Jesus" is not in any way connected with the body of a man who lived two thousand years ago. "Jesus" in this sense is not a person but a symbol for a being who lives in the light of God, and thus represents that part of us -- the only true part -- which is eternal love. The book is inspired not by the symbol but by the underlying Love.

We frequently adopt symbols as a means to comprehend the deeper meaning. The early Egyptians believed that the star Sirius was a goddess (Sopdet) and that it was she who caused the flooding of the Nile when she appeared each year. The appearance of the star was merely a symptom of the seasonal rotation of the Earth... It symbolized a larger underlying principle. This was something the Egyptians could not possibly comprehend, but they could certainly comprehend the shining light in the dark sky, and the rising, life-giving waters of the fertile river. They did not actively seek to find or elect a symbol, and in fact were not aware that it was a symbol. They worshipped it as though it were a holy first-cause.

Finally regarding the reliability of those gospels, perhaps it is helpful to review the answer to a previous similar question on the website, which explains it much better than I can:

Since the Gospels were written down approximately 50 years after the historical Jesus' death, there is no certainty that any of the accounts accurately report what the he actually said. In fact, Scripture scholars have established that Jesus probably did not say most of the things that are recorded in the Gospels. The Lord's Prayer, therefore, would not necessarily have come directly from Jesus. It is compatible with the entire teaching of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, which, as you say, make sin and the world very real. From the perspective of A Course in Miracles, the only explanation for this is that the teaching of the Bible is not the teaching of the Course. They are not similar and can be compared only in contrast, since the Course uses terms found in the Bible but with a different interpretation. You should do whatever you are comfortable with, whatever helps you feel loved and forgiven. If the Bible and Christianity help you achieve that, it would be foolish not to follow that path.

So, dear "Anonymous," I really don't think anyone wants to "disparage" the gospels that you love, as you put it. To do so simply would not be loving, and would be against all principles of the Course, which explicitly states that it will never attack your ego, but it will try to teach how your thought system arose.

Thank you very much for your comment. Perhaps you will write again.

A bed, a bath, and no bugs.

2006-10-12T20:20:00.000-04:00

I don't like to do this too much but two different friends have asked me for copies of a blog entry from 3 years ago, before I came to the US. Ostensibly it is about Bloomsbury and medical treatment, but it might have subtexts -- I can't decide. Since recently I have been very busy with no time to write here - I am repeating that old page with the promise to myself I will post some fresh stuff soon. This post is rather timely because another blogger whose page I read, has been working through some difficult problems lately, and her struggles with the palpable pain of time slowly passing -- put me in mind of Virginia Woolf. I sent her a Woolf quote - which is a dangerous thing to do since so many Woolf quotes dally with the notion of suicide.

Ms. Woolf was one of the most famous literary residents of Bloomsbury. She might aptly be called the patron saint of bloggers, with her statement

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Most quotations herein are from T.S Eliot’s, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, except where otherwise noted. Eliot was an American who took up British residence (and citizenship) and also lived in Bloomsbury, as did so many literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to ask an overwhelming question.
Oh do not ask “what is it”
Let us go and make our visit…

The thing is, you see, I can’t decide if I am a cynic or an incurable romantic. There is no possibility that I am anything in between… except possibly a nihilist. I could happily inhabit the Left Bank or the Montmartre district of Paris. I could smoke Gitanes and argue the Myth of Sisyphus over café au lait… If only it weren’t for all those infernal French people ;-) But I’m doing the next best thing… I’ve spent the last week in Bloomsbury, mostly in the care of the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square. Queen Square is like Evelyn Waugh’s secret garden, “not overlooked by any window.” No one knows it is there. Cab drivers drop you off a block away because they can’t find it or can’t get in. It is approachable from the south only by a pair of tiny narrow streets, one of which is one-way in the wrong direction. From the West only a pedestrian alley gets you in, as is also the case from the North. From the East is the most feasible approach Start from High Holborn, walk down Lambs Conduit Street and turn left on Great Ormond Street. To come in that way unveils a pageant of grand old Victorian red-brick hospitals with intriguing names like The Hospital For Sick Children, and the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (presumably a little of what you don’t fancy does you good). What do you suppose the emergency ward is like in the Royal Homeopathic Hospital? If a man is brought in with multiple gunshot wounds what do you suppose they do? Put very very dilute lead-extract drops under his tongue?

Anyway, Great Ormond street terminates in Queen Square, and suddenly there you are in this perfect little hidden Victorian enclave, about three hundred meters square, with a lovely little manicured park and gardens in the center, surrounded by very Londonish black iron railings. All around the square facing inward are high echoing, six storey cool stone and redbrick buildings, with a multitude of terraces, cornices, reliefs, stained glass, ledges, steps, brass signs, black railings and plaques commemorating where Duke this or Princess that or Lady so-and-so dedicated a new something, always in the name of her majesty goodness-gracious Queen Victoria herself. The little street that runs around it is just wide enough for two hansom-cabs to pass. Unfortunately cars are parked on both sides, leaving a strip of road just wide enough for a slender cyclist to navigate. This does not deter the delivery trucks (sorry – “lorries”) that pick their painful way between the parked cars around the right-angles of the square with only millimeters of clearance on either side, often getting stuck until the owners of the offending vehicles return hours later to move them.

The reigning monarch of the square is the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which occupies buildings on both sides of the quadrangle and generates a steady stream of pedestrian traffic from one side to the other, cutting through the peaceful little park with its mysterious statue of “Humphrey” the cat, and its numerous daffodil flowerbeds and bench seats. The whole scene is a delightful enclave of pregnant peace, humming and echoing with the hushed sounds of the city, nearby but unseen… a world of its own.

In the light airs of summer you might think you have stumbled on the lost valley of Shangrila. Time has no meaning here. The mighty rumblings of London do not enter. This is a little wormhole in the fabric of the British universe, immune from the present day. In the dark dreary winter the London fogs descend under their own density into the square and sit there, transforming the geometry into the limitless. You can almost feel the languid tedious gazes of scores of patients from the hospital windows as time hangs heavy like the yellow-gray curtain of mist outside.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window panes…

If you have to have a neurological disorder and if you have to get treatment or diagnosis somewhere in the world, this is probably the place to come. I have not been to all the famous venues, such as Johns Hopkins or Mayo, nonetheless intuition tells me they would lack the grand style of this institution. My cumulative man-years of experience in American hospitals have taught me to expect extreme efficiency, modernity, processity, systemity, automity, dispassionity, and the kind of mediocrity which comes from being subjected to all the aboveity. The National Hospital for Neurology (NHN) has the incomparable advantage of being British, which means it avoids being efficient at all costs. This results in a delightful staff-to-patient ratio about three times higher than in the US. It also means that rather than shuttle you in and out of an outpatient facility in a single day, to save money, or several days in a row, to save money, with all the associated travel and trauma, they are inclined to provide the patient with a nice little bed to sleep in, a nice little bathroom to shower in, a TV to watch, and three free meals a day. Oh yes – did I mention the numerous free cups of tea and coffee from the trolley which comes around? Cookies too! With so much idle time on one’s hands, the clatter of the tea-trolley becomes a welcome Pavlovian signal of distraction to the resident patients.

For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…

All this while reclining in splendor in the bosom of Bloomsbury, drinking in the curving colonnades of Georgian townhouses, with the grand old British Museum, and the University of London for neighbors, not to mention the ghosts of the English literati reposing all around: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. N Whitehead… Oy Vey! All those agnostics! This is a high rent district sure enough. It exudes antique grace and charm from every pore of every brick of every townhouse. There is more charm and history in a single beech tree on Great Russell street than in most North American cities.

Come, we shall find a room with a bed, a bath, and no bugs, in Bloomsbury.
Poet: Dylan Thomas, resident of Bloomsbury, spoken to his wife.

London has a reputation as a stimulating city, but those who judge it so, and who care about such things are usually travelers – or those trying to entice travelers. Areas steeped in history like Bloomsbury are part of the city’s international charm. If I were wealthy and I chose to live in London I would take up residence here myself. At night I would haunt the streets of Soho and Covent Garden – a stones throw away. By day I would stroll the dappled tree-lined squares of Bloomsbury.

Thank God most visitors and travelers never get to see the rest of London. I know it well because I was born there, and I can tell you, once you get beyond a fairly small area, most of it is an immensely depressing and dingy place. North London, which I know best, is fine as far as Hampstead. But North of the Heath is like a different planet. Once you get up into the desolate tracts of Golders Green, Finchley, Hendon, Cricklewood or Kilburn, it is one vast drab wasteland of endless streets with endless rows of maisonettes, and tawdry little high streets packed with curry joints, fish and chip shops, betting shops, Tesco supermarkets, dirty little pubs, and dark apartment buildings. There are enclaves of quaintness to be sure but on the whole the national character of the architecture and the mindset is soggily stuck in what Sir Terence Conran calls the “Georgabethan” style. The charm, history and character of the city is unknown and irrelevant in these minions. Here it is just double-decker buses, death and taxes. The hopelessness is written on the faces of the inhabitants. In the animated film of “Yellow Submarine,” Eleanor Rigby is set in a bleak brown forbidding world of British pre-war terraced houses and crumbling businesses. That just about sums it up. In that context, the well-known lyric: “Look at all the lonely people” seems to be a comment on the alienating nature of that urban landscape. I would rather live in Bakersfield, and that’s saying something.

So we recline in splendor here in Bloomsbury, this little community of diverse humans from diverse walks of life, thrown together by little twists of neurological fate – a little myelin missing here, a little substantia nigra eroded there, all people with obscure and difficult disorders, some life-threatening, some not, some more debilitating, some less, but all with two things in common: First, we all need periodic treatment and evaluation to keep us functional, second – we are all to some extent guinea-pigs. In the world of neurology there are very few cures. It’s a good gig being a neurologist: there are few happy endings -- your patients don’t really expect one, but they keep coming back anyway. You keep measuring, testing, trying new dosages and discussing the latest miracle drugs which, it turns out, aren’t. A neurologist is not so much a doctor in the sense that he solves medical problems, but more of a highly professional mechanic, fiddling with a machine he does not understand and cannot fix, but he knows more about it than you do, and he can keep tweaking it for optimum performance, given the circumstances. Neurology is a highly intellectual pursuit, with little hardcore empirical evidence of anything. Often the only valid confirmation of a diagnosis is an autopsy: a procedure which most patients would wish to forego. Good neurologists are highly intuitive puzzle solvers, wielding a battery of tests which only vaguely indicate the problem, and only slightly narrow the possibilities. Conclusions from tests are usually an intersection of matrices rather than smoking guns. Ultimately their best diagnostic tool is their own intellect and insight, combined with a certain amount of trial and error.

Here in Bloomsbury is accumulated an enviable clique of these intellectual giants. The hospital has a distinguished reputation as a center of excellence for teaching and study, as well as being a headquarters for neurological clinical studies. If you are a patient with condition “X” and you want to participate in a clinical study you read about in the papers, you can certainly apply, but you will quickly find there are five thousand applicants for ten positions, and your odds are slim. But if you are a patient of one of the intellectual giants at NHN, guess what…? It is they who conduct many of the studies, and they frequently select participants from among their own patients. The reason is simple … publish or perish! There is enormous competition among the “consultants” as they are called, to attain celebrity status. Preferably international celebrity status. The more studies they can run, the more they can publish the results in Lancet, or Journal of Neurology, or New England Journal of Medicine. The more they can intellectually dissect the complex field of neurological disorders into categories and subcategories, the more papers and monographs they can publish, claiming ownership of some allegedly new variant of a condition, to be quoted in future by other consultants. I think I am unlikely to enjoy that honor. If you see any publications citing Best, et al, please let me know. You will make my day.

You can see how these consultants view themselves by watching them do their rounds. Once a week they swoop through the wards to inspect their charges, like princes obliged to hobnob with villagers. While everyone else wears white or standard medical garb, the consultants swagger around in tailored suits, accompanied by a fawning bevy of wannabe students, younger doctors, distinguished international visitors, and miscellaneous scribblers who write down everything frantically. The nurses naturally buy into the whole “prince” mentality and dart around like worker ants, fetching and carrying at the prince’s beck and call, preparing patients for inspection with all the dehumanizing haste and flurry of runway models behind the scenes at a fashion show. God forbid that some record or chart should be unavailable or lost at the precise moment a great prince requests it. The poor nurse responsible for it gets a slightly disdainful “never mind,” which is probably the career equivalent of a kiss on the cheek from Al Capone. As far as the patients are concerned, the princes speak about them in a very loud British accent, charged with supreme confidence, as if they were not even there, unless of course it is necessary to ask them a question. Once the answer is obtained however, the patient is immediately excluded from the process again.

You have to remember every patient is a puzzle to be solved. He or she is a piece of meat to be prodded, poked, tested and adjusted, this way and that, until some acceptable result is obtained. What tends to happen is that the patient is completely excluded from the diagnostic process until it is complete. It is much like the way Holmes always treated Watson, keeping him in the dark until the very end, when all was revealed. So the NHN will send you upstairs and down for test after test, without sharing the results at all. You sit on your little bed, eat the three meals a day and chat with your shipmates. Every so often the porter arrives to wheel someone off to the dank catacombs of the castle for some other hideous unimaginable procedure. When he returns he is none the wiser. He knows what was done to him but he knows not why. He sits in ignorance contemplating his fate. He reads the British papers. He watches the “telly.” He drinks more tea. Perhaps like me, he writes a journal…

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Sooner or later though, the consultants come up with an answer, or a best guess. Then the patient gets a slightly different kind of visit, in which he is told what is wrong with him, and what kind of treatment he is going to get. At that point he may be released to the care of his family doctor (or “GP” in England) or he may be set up with visits to a hospital in his hometown, or – he may win the lottery – like me – and be placed on the list of “regular” patients at party central – the NHN itself! That is precisely my situation… every so often I need an intravenous infusion of rather rare and expensive drugs. There’s a faint – very faint – possibility of an adverse reaction, so they prefer to administer the drugs themselves. Thus I get to enjoy the Bloomsbury hospitality for a few days. However the main reason they want to keep me coming back is because the condition needs constant monitoring and evaluation. As a result, I get to enjoy five precious golden minutes with the prince, my consultant, one afternoon during my treatment.

You have to know how to manage this royalty. I have found the best method is to do all my own medical research on the internet, where all the latest advances can quickly be found, then to print out the papers on the topics which concern me, and which may be of benefit to me. Then when the consultant breezes through with his entourage of drones, and draws the curtains around my little bed in a single authoritative swoosh, I hit him with requests for state-of-the-art progress in all the areas I have researched. If there is some new technique or drug he has not heard of he is likely to say – “There is no applicable research on that yet.” At that moment I present him with the printout and say “Actually, there is… Let me give you this information for your review and …” (here you look directly at the poor worker drone who is scribbling notes) … “we can make a note to review it at our next meeting, yes?” The drone looks at the prince, who says “Yes,” (what else can he say without losing face?”) and the drone licks his pencil and writes this down. Then I cement this by saying “Let’s see … what date will that be…?” The consultant is then obliged to figure out the next time we will meet and say the date, and so the poor drone is obliged to write it in the notes, because the prince hath spake it.

It’s good to have things in the notes because then if they don’t get done I can refer the consultant to his own notes, which is embarrassing, and usually results in them getting done the next time. It’s all silly games and politics I know, and I don’t really want to belittle the skills or abilities of these neurologists: they are among the best in the world. Unfortunately in the world of medicine, the relationship between doctor and patient has become far from simple and direct, particularly in the specialty fields. The only way to break through the iron rule of isolationism, protectionism, and bureaucracy among specialists is to apply a little left-handed politics… all the while shrugging affably and trying hard to act like you are just a dumb layman…

Advise the prince, no doubt an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous...

At least the British system makes this possible. Now that I am living in the US again, I see what tends to happen is – after the initial diagnosis all treatment is administered by nurses only, and on an outpatient basis. They just follow a written regimen. The specialist rarely if ever visits the outpatient clinics, and the infernal American medical insurance companies make it as difficult as humanly possible for you to get to see your specialist again. You must first see a primary care physician, who if you’re lucky will then write you another referral, so you can book another appointment with the specialist – probably months later. There is simply no opportunity for regular exchange of information with the princes, and regular review and evaluation. The American scourge of cost-saving efficiency renders the prince remote and unapproachable, leaving the poor patient to fend for himself, with his future dictated by royal covenants from a distant palace, rendered by faceless nurses... who, unlike their British counterparts, do not serve me tea, and think my fears are cause for silent snickering behind the curve of the great desk at the end of the room that marks the intractable boundary between their world and mine.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter,
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid…

London, 2004.

Footnote: In July 2005, in Russell Square in the heart of Bloomsbury, a terrorist bomb blasted a London bus into twisted metal, killing and wounding many people. Buses still ply the square, and daffodils still grow -- but quo vadis Virginia? I fear we both are lost forever.

No V8.

2006-09-27T17:47:00.000-04:00

Diagonal rain beats a tattoo on the windows. The living room breathes in soft shadow. I'm reclined on the sofa listening to the burbles and splatters of a wet afternoon. In a world made up entirely of places and things, there is no place to go and no-thing to do. I am roaming mentally. Decades ago there was a hallway that seemed always defined by the morning sunlight streaming through a transom. Where did the hallway go when it rained? It is nowhere in memory's lost labyrinths. There were sullen afternoons where the clouds welled up like bruises over the poplar trees, and in the dark still before the storm I was afraid and wanted to go home. There was a night when the heavens opened up their canons and shot forth fire and sound that shook the streets. I remember a train station and me huddled under a scalloped canopy, shivering and peering at the slashing rain, trying to choose a time to dash between the lightning bolts. I remember running through the streets of Boston in a blinding downpour, finally succumbing to nature, no longer trying to dodge the drops, but taking a langorous natural bath in all my clothes, feeling the rivers of heaven streaming down my face, my neck, my shirt, my legs, filling my shoes, trying to wash me into the streets along with the dust and debris of the day. I remember a glass frame in a garden, used to grow -- I think -- cucumbers, smashed by the sheer weight of water after its three thousand foot trajectory from the skies above. I remember a mathematics class where the rain outside was so spectacular that all eyes turned to the window to gape, and the teacher was reduced to sarcasm "Haven't you seen rain before?" I remember three soggy days of windless rain on a small sailboat, and we four small boys reduced to sitting in the tiny cabin quoting Coleridge: "water water everywhere" while the tarpaulins flapped and dripped. I remember coming out of the Paris Metro one spring day and being met by a tidal wave of runoff from a sudden storm, crashing down the steps sending commuters screeching back into the tunnels to wring themselves dry and regroup. There was a car my father had which always stalled when driven through any kind of standing water; nevertheless he would venture forth fearlessly in the worst of weather, somehow never dreaming history would repeat itself. There were afternoons in Florida when the palette of the sky turned to black ink and the rain was so intense it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the ocean began. I had an employee who always hid under the desk till the thunder passed, convinced the day of judgment was nigh. Now he is a priest, presumably telling everyone it really is nigh. I should have been a priest, or "a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across ocean floors." I could have been a priest. I could'a been a contender. I could'a had a V8. I could'a, I would'a, I should'a. Hell - one day I will! But right now I'm too comfortable on my sofa listening to the rain.

The Road less travelled

2006-09-21T22:46:00.000-04:00

This post has nothing to do with theology or ACIM. It is just personal. Movie critic Roger Ebert has been having health problems, and has had surgery, so he has not been writing reviews lately. Recently his website http://www.rogerebert.com/ ran a little retrospective of reviews of the greatest movies ever. I was so glad to see Days Of Heaven listed.

No one I know has ever seen this film, or even heard of it ... but it means so much to me. Ebert calls it "one of the most beautiful films ever made."

Days Of Heaven gets its title from Deuteronomy 11:21 ("That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.") It is the story of three migrant workers in 1916, who take a job on a Texas farm to escape the law up in Chicago. One of the three, a young adolescent girl, is the voice-over narration of the film. She is old before her time. From her apocalyptic flashes we can glimpse the sweep and scope of the story:

I met this guy named Ding-Dong. He told me the whole Earth is goin' up in flame. Flames will come out of here and there and they'll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water's gonna rise in flames. There's gonna be creatures runnin' every which way, some of them burnt, half of their wings burnin'. People are gonna be screamin' and hollerin' for help. See, the people that have been good - they're gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you've been bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear ya talkin'.

You might think this is just the overactive imagination of a lonely deprived girl, but the genius of the filmmakers lies in knowing we will make just that assumption and dismiss her words. But they are prophetic, and at the dramatic climax of the film, everyone's world goes up in flames. Slowly we come to realize that the recurring flippant nihilism of her narrative voice is the descant -- it is the "point" to the "counterpoint" of the visual beauty.

You couldn't sort it out. The Devil just sittin' there laughin'. He's glad when people does bad. Then he sends them to the snake house. He just sits there and laughs and watch, while you're sittin' there all tied up and snakes are eatin' your eyes out. They go down your throat and eat all your systems out.

The film is shot in widescreen 70mm, and rich with the ominous sparse wonder of the praries. Recently I went to an Andrew Wyeth show at the High museum in Atlanta and the whole time I was there I kept thinking of Days Of Heaven. In a way it is like a giant animated Wyeth masterpiece.

Was it a mistake casting "pretty boy" Richard Gere as the central character: an inarticulate trouble-prone drifter, but with a genuine concern for his girlfriend/companion, and her sister? Was it a mistake adopting an oblique episodic style, where the dialog frequently seems improvised and muttered, almost overheard at times? At times there seems to be an intense narrative thread, and we become absorbed in the personal relationships. But always the immediate emotional roller-coaster is smoothed over by the great pastiche of the plains; sunswept, windswept, and quivering under the threat of giant thunderheads, and delicately sprinkled with Saint Saens. It is a disorienting masterpiece and you become clay under its influence. After a while you are just along for the experience, willing to accept any human outcome as long as the eerie beauty is sustained, yet sensing that no outcome is possible save a tragic one.

Credit for the mystical construction is usually given to director Terence Malick, who more recently directed The Thin Red Line, but I think differently. In 1978, shortly after the film was released, I lived for a short time in Greenwich Village in New York. There I met Jacob Brackman, the producer of the film, and had a long conversation with him about it. I was trying to get a handle (from a creative point of view) on exactly how such poignancy came into existence. Exactly what process, or whose decisions led to its disquieting qualities? At that time I had just left CBC Television in Canada where I had been working as a documentary producer in current affairs. My last stint there was a show with a TV host named Robert Cooper, who acted as a kind of roving investigator/trouble- shooter, advocate. It was your basic "Robin Hood" show. Since then, Cooper has made a name for himself as executive producer of "Stargate SG-1" and "Stargate Atlantis".

Anyway I was all ga-ga at meeting Brackman. It was a social meeting, arranged through an old friend. I must have seemed like a dumb teenager to him, but he is a peaceful man who shows respect and concern for everyone. During a long chat in a book-lined living room I learned some surprising facts, such as:

Richard Gere was not first choice for the part. First choice (but unavailable) was John Travolta.

The film was not shot in 70mm. It was shot in conventional 35mm, but was blown up to 70mm as part of a series of experiments to find a way to enhance its visual appeal to make up for perceived inadequacies in other areas.

The episodic, fragmented style was not deliberate. It represented an attempt to recover from failure. The shooting was fraught with problems: nothing worked, and nothing fit together. Sound was poor, continuity was off, key scenes were missing. Brackman's genius was in deciding to put the material together collage-style, and blend it all in with the larger visual panorama - add the girl's deadpan narration then blow it up to 70mm and let Ennio Morricone's music and the visuals carry everything along. It was almost an accident.

Brackman was modest enough about it all, as if he had just been lucky. But the guiding force behind it was his exquisite sensitivity to time and place and pace, and a recognition of the inevitable bittersweet tragedy of love.

I did not know it then, but I know now, that Brackman is a friend of Singer Carly Simon, and actually wrote the lyrics to a number of her greatest hits, including "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" and "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" Sometime when you have a minute listen to the words of "That's the way I've always heard it should be." Here is a young teenage girl feeling her father's remoteness and unavailability, and lamenting the inseparable gulf between her parents ...

My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark
The living room is still
I walk by, no remark
I tiptoe past the master bedroom where
My mother reads her magazines
I hear her call "Sweet dreams"
But I forget how to dream

Ms. Simon's father was Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster, the publishing company. He did indeed stay up all night reading and smoking. Their house was often the setting for fashionable receptions for the literati of the time, and the young girl often felt woefully inadequate and inarticulate. She developed a terrible stutter and it was her mother who suggested she try singing her words.

Ah, my ... why all ths reminiscence? There was a time when these things were important to me and I craved the high-profile creative life. Today what has become of me? Are my dreams shattered and squashed, or have my priorities simply changed? I live on a constant see-saw between love of the arts and disdain for them. Not an aesthetic disdain but a theological one. Two paths diverge in the woods, and sometimes I am sad for the one I did not take.

Both Sides Now.

2006-09-05T12:34:00.000-04:00

Timothy Leary used to call it the "five and dime" syndrome. In the first half of the 20th century America saw a proliferation of stores selling cheap little toys, candies and knick-knacks for five-cents or ten cents, giving rise to the name "five and dime." Due to inflation, today's equivalent would be the "dollar" stores. Enough of the history lesson: the point is - the inside of a five and dime store is a very depressing environment (unless you are in love with cultural icons). Here everything is crass and cardboard and plastic and shrinkwrapped. All items are low-quality, stamped-out, second-rate, bare-bones, gaudy, tasteless, and -- well -- cheap! Lighting is bare-bulb vulgar, decor is non-existent, and the aisles seem filled with sallow haunted faces, picking through worthless bric-a-brac.

Leary, the self appointed guru of the psychedelic drug culture noted that certain aspects of the LSD experience are a lot like being trapped inside a five and dime store. All perception seems to take on a pallid meaningless hue. Everything seems cheap and tawdry, and the universe becomes a place of brittle plastic junk, devoid of meaning. That phrase "devoid of meaning" holds the key. In such a universe, all objects are reduced to pure form, and revealed to us as they really are: without purpose. It has been a long time since I read Dr. Leary but I recall he had the insight not to say that this aspect of altered perception was wrong or invalid, or any less real than any other. It was just the flip-side of beauty. Most people of course indulged in mind-altering drugs hoping for the beauty, and were frequently shocked by revelations of its tawdry underbelly. But one without the other is impossible. To perceive beauty entails the idolizing of form. Not to perceive it involves an inability to idolize form. The form itself is still perceived, but it becomes flat and meaningless. It conveys nothing. It is an empty shell, a hoax, an illusion, where once there was a world that seemed to have purpose and promise.

Depression often involves a sense of "flatness". Life holds no joy. Nothing gives pleasure. Have you been there? Of course we say that is not normal or natural, and we medicate it pretty damn quick! Can't have people walking the streets questioning the meaning of consumerism! It's bad for the economy. In a sense, today's pharmaceuticals are a more sophisticated version of Leary's. They are custom designed to lead us away from a particular type of "mis"-perception. The irony is of course that there is no correct type of perception: all perception is false knowledge. Even "vision" (as experienced by "visionaries") is a form of perception, thus a form of illusion. A Course in Miracles (as you may know) distinguishes most profoundly between perception and knowledge, telling us the two are mutually incompatible. Perception is of form, while knowledge is of purpose. Of "visions" the Course says:

The fact that perception is involved at all removes the experience from the realm of knowledge. That is why visions, however holy, do not last.

The implication of course is that knowledge is eternal, and whatever is not eternal is not knowledge. Thus the shifting sands of perception, whether drug-induced, or drug-reduced, or "normal" or "visionary" are all just temporary. Some are more useful and productive in a world of form, but none is right and none is wrong. All are false because none are knowledge.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all -- (Joni Mitchell)

For the last few weeks I've been struggling with cars, people, and pigs. It began one day when I saw a picture of a pig on a TV farming show. I suppose I don't normally pay that much attention to pigs, but this one caught my attention. I knew what it was of course (i.e. it's label or symbol was "pig") but what I saw was - a self-propelled alimentary canal. At one end was a snuffling nose and mouth, and at the other end: an anus. The entire "pig" thing was just an elaborate explosion of form around this ugly pink tube, designed to enable locomotion and other bodily necessities for perpetuating the eternal foraging and excretion. But this was circular, for the foraging and excretion had no purpose other than to support the locomotive mechanisms, and the locomotive mechanisms had no purpose other than .... well you understand.

"No purpose" Now there was a five and dime theme to stick in the mind. It was ugly just becuse it lacked purpose. It was pure pointless form. There may be beautiful pigs and ugly pigs, but in their self-serving pointlessness, they are all obscene. Look at a pig sometime and explain to me "what is the point?"

Now look at a human being and answer the same question. We are not horizontal and we don't snuffle (mostly) but those are simple variations of form. Fundamentally we are self-propelled alimentary canals. We are ludicrus manifestations of form around a long tube, designed to support a bunch of corollary subsystems that make continued existence of the tube possible - for a few years. This is creation in all its glory??

Alright, I hear you saying I need to increase my medications. You are right. Modern medications have as their goal the selective tuning of perception so we don't perceive things this "incorrect" way. Instead we perceive in a way that makes us unquestioning productive members of society. We see roses and sunsets and rainbows, and birthdays, and graduations, promotions, inventions, engagements, bar-mitzvahs, weddings, mexican-food, italian-food, football, baseball, water ski-ing, bike-week, art-collecting, ebay selling, cable-TV, interior-decorating, kittens, puppies, babies, little piggies, "this little piggy went to market", and Santa. In short, all things to keep us busy and mindless. But the Course teaches differently ...

In all these diversionary tactics, however, the one question that is never asked by those who pursue them is "What for?" This is the question that you must learn to ask in connection with everything. What is the purpose?

It does seem to me that a car has more purpose than either a pig or a person. Both the mammals are just self-serving self-propelled feeding-excreting, warm-blooded blobs, one horizontal, one vertical. A car is very similar: it is certainly "auto-mobile" or self-propelled, and it is certainly largely concerned with ingesting fuel and belching out waste-products, but at least it serves the slightly greater purpose of carrying more than its own mass, thus being useful for transporting other pigs and humans around in search of food. Relax! I am joking of course - a car is not more important or valuable than a person. If it were, then our cities would be given over to cars, streets would be eight-lanes of traffic with no sidewalks for people. Stores, churches, schools, and office buildings would be accessible only by automobile, far beyond any reasonable walking distance, and would have to be surrounded by giant parking lots. Giant car dealerships would sprawl over hundreds of acres, and entire industries would develop around the manufacturing, selling, leasing, renting, insuring, and repairing of these four-wheeled demi-gods. People would install stereos and TV's and air-conditioners in their cars, and spend half their day in them, talking on little squawking gadgets to people elsewhere in other cars. What a sad world that would be. :-)

The point is of course that "purpose" cannot ever be expressed in terms of usefulness to the overall illusion. In that sense a doctor has far more purpose than a rock, and a cell-phone has more purpose than a cigarette butt. But in a larger sense all these components of form are equal and all have the same ultimate meaning, which is -- none. This places us firmly in Leary's five and dime store, in a universe where all form is without meaning: just hideous random brownian motion, bubbling and roiling out of the void like Joni Mitchell's clouds, and back into nothing. This I think is the quintessential dilemna of the existentialists. Their despair is justified. All aspects of existence are equally without meaning, so we fill our lives with idols that we worship as a substitute for meaning. Where the Course differs in this regard is in teaching us not to deny our despair and disgust, but to see it with forgiveness. It turns the ego's weapons on itself, gently deflating the meaning of all those idols and opening us up to true knowledge.

Have a Nice Day.

2006-08-03T20:57:00.000-04:00

I know I should get a life, but lately I have been paying attention to usage of the phrase "Have a nice day." I've found some interesting variants ...

First there are the escalating "bigger and better" versions. I suppose these are based on the idea that more must be better. Perhaps people are becoming desensitized to plain old "nice" and need something with more horsepower to impart the same effect. For example we hear "Have a great day," "Have a wonderful day," "Have a terrific day," "Have a fun day," and "Have an awesome day." This last variation seems to be mostly used by fundamentalist christians, who believe "This is the day the Lord hath given us." If the day comes from such an impeccable source it must be "awesome", with the implication that if yours is not awesome there is something suspiciously un-christian about you. There are even variations in this, with "Have a blessed day." being the reigning champion of hyperbole in the bible-belt.

Then there are the blase or laconic variants, such as "have a good one," "have a nice one," etc. These sort of remind me of the old story about how all jokes are numbered, and all you have to do to get a laugh is say "Thirty Eight" and everyone breaks up. The punchline of course is that a newcomer tried saying "Thirty Eight" and no-one laughed. When he asked why, they said: "we've heard that one before." When someone says "Have a good one" they are apparently speaking some kind of shorthand. It is not necessary to ask: "A good what?" But surely this only works in situations where the missing word is so common as to be unnecessary? If I say "I am going to the store to buy a few big ones," you would be justified in asking "a few big what?" But if I say "I'm going home to drink a few cold ones," most people would fill in the blanks with the word "beers". There is is the element of assumed familiarity and shared lifestyle habits. Since it is assumed we all have the habit of wishing each other "a nice day," it becomes unnecessary and un-cool to say the phrase in full.

Then there are the very specific variants. No longer content with a blanket directive covering the entire day, people are slicing time more and more thinly. I have heard "Have a nice morning," "Have a nice afternoon," "Have a nice evening," "Have a nice lunchbreak," etc. Funny thing about "Have a nice evening"... people seem to start using it about noon. Mostly it is store-salespeople and hotel-clerks. Every time I check into a hotel about 2:00, the desk-clerk always finishes by telling me to "have a nice evening." Am I supposed to just skip the afternoon entirely? Either they work in windowless, clockless environments, and have no idea what time it is, or they perceive themselves as imprisoned in the mundane grind of a meaningless job, and for them - life could not possibly begin until one finishes work and goes home ... finally able to "have a nice evening." Wishing that on me is some kind of tacit assumption that I live the same lifestyle.

Then again perhaps every utterance of this type is just a kind of meaningless fluff to fill an otherwise embarassingly blank space. No! Really? Can we really be that insincere? Curiously, almost every Britisher I talk to says Americans seem superficial and insincere compared to English people. When pressed on this point, nearly everyone mentions the phrase "have a nice day" as the prime example of insincerity encountered in the USA. They parrot the phrase with curled lips and dripping sarcasm, as only the British can. It is taken as the de-facto truth in the UK that when any American says these words, he does not really mean them. In fact I looked up the origin of the phrase on a British website, and I found this very unforgiving and anti-American definition ...

Have a nice day
Meaning: A salutation, ostensibly to offer good wishes. In fact a banal and insincere form of words given to anyone and everyone. Evidence of the meaninglessness of the sentiment is the fact that it is even used last thing at night when the opportunity to have a nice day has all but disappeared.
Origin: US origin - around 1970s.
We might feel a little slighted, but take heart - I've discovered the perfect counter-argument. If you read 'The Canterbury Tales' written in 1387 by English author Geoffrey Chaucer - in 'The Knight's Tale' the character uses the expression "Fare well, have a good day." Chaucer is buried in Westminster Abbey along with Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and others. He is no literary lightweight. Everything he wrote is studied, revered and idolized in Englit courses worldwide. So if it was good enough for him it should be good enough for his countrymen.

Take that, England! Stop criticizing and go home. And have a nice day.

Great Wall

2006-07-22T14:25:00.000-04:00

When I was in China I still had to update the Course website weekly. This was a challenge because the Chinese apparently consider the Course to be seditious material. I was completely unable to access the website from anywhere inside China; I would simply receive a polite notice on my screen (in Chinese) saying that web page was "unavailable". I suppose all that discussion of love and forgiveness must seem pretty threatening. Two thousand years ago they built the Great Wall to keep the outside world -- outside. Today they are completing its modern day equivalent -- the Great Firewall. They are spending huge amounts in manpower to try and ensure that freedom of information is not a feature of everyday life. I don't know if they will succeed; as long as there are proxy servers in the world, people will just log on and surf freely, (as I did.) Still it is thought-provoking to know the Course is in the same forbidden league as Falun-Gong, BBC News, the Dalai Lama, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the country of Taiwan, and about 19,000 other websites, at last count.
But before we rush in waving flags and handing out gum, let us remember China's culture is far older than our own. Is it not neoconservatism to assume that what we revere in the west is applicable and desirable globally? That the Chinese "deserve" free access to information? Could we not look at our own recent history of suspicion and censorship, paranoia and possible eavesdropping, and mutter - very quietly - "mea culpa". Anyone who believes there is no internet censorship in our homeland might want to try logging on to the Course website using the free wi-fi at any of the 900 U.S. locations of Panera Bread. You will see a screen telling you that you have tried to access "occult" material, and your request has been blocked. (Fortunately the sandwiches aren't bad.) That old stand-by of Cultural Relativism suggests we should leave other countries well-enough alone. China will get to wherever it is going with or without our opinions or values. Napoleon is reputed to have said "Let China sleep. When she awakens the world will be sorry", which was itself a kind of laissez faire relativism. The classical objection to Cultural Relativism is that non-interference can prevent moral progess... as manifested in this case by the alleged suppression of freedoms. However no one can deny the huge de-facto influence of Western culture on the East already, and what moral progress has that accomplished? If having an entire generation of Chinese women craving Britney Spears' wardrobe is moral progress, perhaps it might be better not to spread our values quite so zealously.
Anyway, no one can possibly suppress the truth forever. Nor need they. We all do an excellent job of burying it ourselves.

No title

2006-07-18T22:18:00.000-04:00

Still traveling. I have now reached a vast and torrid land, devoid of life; where overweight natives line the landscape with sad flags and crosses, to ward off the arid emptiness. To live here is to be in isolation, hoping for private pockets of meaning.

Mama Mia.

2006-07-09T18:53:00.000-04:00

I humbly retract everything I previously said about large groups of people sharing a common purpose. You should try being on the streets of London the night after Italy just won the world cup!

The Timeless Sea

2006-07-08T05:53:00.000-04:00

"Brought together in a common purpose." I am always accused of cynicism when talking about our reactions to terrorism. I always felt we were falsely united in our hatred of a common enemy. Somewhere I remember reading the words; "Nowhere do we bond more deeply than in our wounds." The Course teaches that we have created a world of adversity and death so we can proclaim our own innocence in suffering. "Brother behold me, for at your hand I die." When something "terrible" occurs like 9/11 or like the London bombings of exactly one year ago today, we can all feel like victims of a common victimizer, which is a powerful unifying force. The trouble is - it only seems to unify us by solidifying our mutual belief in an illusion. It does not help us escape from it.

Yesterday at 12:00 noon I was riding the London tube (subway) when the announcement was made that the entire transportation system was going to observe a 2-minute silence for those killed in the attacks a year ago. The trains kept moving but the carriage went deathly quiet. Everyone sat lost in private thought. You could feel the silent camaraderie. A few score strangers thrown together in a tunnel who normally would scarcely give a hoot about each other, were suddenly a community of brothers with a comon purpose. Everyone was intensely aware of everyone else. I do not want to belittle the strong need to understand and somehow deal with the shock and the outrage. Everyone was just doing the best they could in terms they understood. The sense of bonding, though perhaps misguided, is a comfort. "Yea though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death ... thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." I just want to remind myself on this day that there is no common enemy, there are no fellow victims, and there is no valley of death. All these things appear to exist because we have forgotten who we really are. Feeling silent sorrow in a subway will not really change things on any level that is important. I remind myself of this - but I still observed the silence.

Last night I attended a concert of Beethoven's sixth played by St Martin in the Fields. Some musicologists hold that all Beethoven's even numbered symphonies were lightweights, while the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth were the masterpieces. That said, you have to wonder if even a lightweight piece by a giant is not still a masterpiece on any scale. The Academy orchestra was not that large (I counted 45 musicians) but they played a finely-honed and sensitive piece at a medium-fast clip, and managed to produce a large dynamic range without effort. Twelve years ago on the same stage at the Barbican I heard the same piece and it seemed mechanical and lifeless. Last night was a different story. Conductor Carlo Rizzi was highly animated and looked at times to be almost fencing with the first violinist, but his energy was infectious and the musicians gave 110%. That moment of epiphany came when one realized all awareness that this was a performance and we were separate beings had been lost. It became a universe of pure music, and you lived and breathed inside it. The big auditorium was full, and as hushed - awash in the timeless sea - and still as statues. I think everyone felt suspended outside of themselves for a while, lost in a beautiful place ...

Seems to me that is being brought together in a common purpose.

In like a lamb, out like a lion.

2006-07-01T18:44:00.000-04:00

Still on the subject of film and its ability to move us. What makes a moment in a film or book, poem or song - into a great moment? Even the most "pop"-ular culture has its epiphanies. Some, like "I'll be back," may seem like just catch-phrases to be sure. But a catch-phrase only catches because it has an element of universal truth that makes it stick. On the surface, "I'll be back" seems neither true nor false: just boastful. However the "truth" of it lies not in the specific context in which it was uttered, but in the more general way it symbolizes the universal resilience of the human spirit. Extrapolating this larger meaning was the function of a generation of movie-goers. Now there is hardly a defeated sportsman or politician who does not mouth the words - to instant recognition.

Should we minimize its significance because it came wrapped in a package of popular entertainment? Best to remember that Shakespeare Chaucer, Dickens, even Mozart were once just “popular” entertainment. Everyday we are deluged with a chaotic shower of words and images: some random, some accidental, some carefully crafted. It does not seem to matter where they come from, or why. It does not matter if they are fact or fiction. What matters is what universal truth we can extract from them. "These are the times that try men's souls," "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," "We have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, toil, and tears," "The meek shall inherit the earth," "To be, or not to be?” even -- "May the force be with you." Who cannot feel some connection to a common humanity in ideas like these?

The problem is not really understanding the impact of such ideas, but understanding how they become heard in the first place above the daily random noise. Consider if "On the Waterfront" were a ninety minute documentary about fishing, with one lament by a fisherman in the middle about how "I coulda been a contender" because some big fish got away from him. Would it still be a part of the American lexicon? I submit that it would not, because with few exceptions, the packaging and the presentation of the ideas are as critically important as the ideas themselves.
In other words, if we hope to teach and inspire, we must accept that for most people, form plays a greater role than content. Is this not, after all, the world of forms? Style – if not more important than substance – is at least of equal importance when attempting to heal the mind. And what is art but style? And what is great art but great truth wrapped up in great style.
A catch phrase is really inspiration presented with the subtle sleight of hand of style. In my opinion, it only succeeds if it can be interpreted on more than one level. The lower level is consistent with the illusion or the plot or the story. In this context it can be accepted without objection because the ego’s guard is down (the willing suspension of disbelief) So “I’ll be back” is just Arnie being cool, and that’s funny! But “I’ll be back” as a universal declaration of human indomitability is more profound, more heavyweight, and more threatening because it requires more thought. Normally the ego, with its propensity to move rapidly from “suspicion to viciousness” would reject such an idea, tainted as it is with the scent of a power greater than itself But wrap it in science-fiction, or patriotism, or soap-opera, and it is allowed to enter. Once in the human psyche it can take root and flower.

We can see exactly the same pattern in “May the Force be with you.” In order for Lucas to succeed with “Star Wars” it had to communicate on more than one level. The ego can ignore comic-book and fairy-tale truisms as nothing but modern nursery-rhymes. The “Force” in question can be accepted without question if it is no more than ancient mythobabble. But once instilled in popular culture it becomes modern mythobabble, and that can be dangerous, for what is the whole illusion if not just a hugely complex and universally accepted myth? Counter-myths or “movements” represent a real threat to the ego.

So the artist, to be successful has to practice cunningness of style. Perhaps this is a more apt definition of the word “craft”. His craft is to package healing medicine in a sugar coating. Not until we have innocently swallowed it do we realize its greater powers. With "I coulda been a contender" suddenly we are not just listening to some washed-up boxer lamenting wasted opportunities, but to humankind itself – to the anguished cry of the collective human psyche – admitting to life’s ultimate lack of purpose.

“In like a lamb, out like a lion” is how great ideas are conveyed. We cannot be force-fed, for we will spit them out. In Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the line “Miles to go before I sleep” is just a folksy little estimate of time and distance. No problem. We can accept that, so into the mind it goes. But it is repeated – “Miles to go before I sleep” Now we are disconcerted. We cannot spit it out for we have already swallowed it. But the sugar coating is off and the true meaning is apparent. We are mortal, and the distance we all must traverse before the final sleep may be great, but it is finite, and we are all getting there. The end may be closer than we think.
Frost’s truth may not be the truth of course. Those of us who view all life as an illusion are perhaps less concerned about the end of illusion. But getting to that point is – to say the least – difficult. A Course in Miracles tries to give us a framework, but be that as it may, most artists struggle with the insoluble paradoxes of the grand illusion. However those struggles inspire us, making inspiration the function of the artist.

The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them? - Bob Dylan.

In a sense, all successful healing must be presented as a double entendre. If you think about it, another word for this is parable. Jesus of Nazareth, if he existed, must have been master of this craft. All of his healing messages were sugar-coated. They were wrapped up as everyday messages about everyday folks and happenings: sons who ran away and came home, strangers helping injured strangers on the street, servants investing their masters’ money, and so on. According to the gospels, most people readily accepted these stories because of their simple-homely content and format. Only after did the more universal truths begin to thrive and grow from the deceptively simple seeds.

It's Chinatown.

2006-06-12T23:34:00.000-04:00

I bought a new DVD of "On the Waterfront" largely because it was one of the few DVD's in the store that offered Chinese subtitles. "Waterfront, Terminal Situation" is the film's title in China. I bought it along with another Chinese-subtitled movie: "Arab Lawrence." starring "Peter Australian Tour" as T.E. Lawrence(!) Anyway one of the bonus features on the DVD was an interview with Elia Kazan. A number of Interesting contradictions surround the making of the film. Not the least of these is the mystique surrounding Sam Spiegel, the producer. Spiegel, it appears, was the man everyone loved to hate. It should be acknowledged that it was Spiegel who pitched the film to the studios and got it made, after Daryl Zanuck dropped it saying America was not interested in longshoremen. It was Spiegel who got Brando, after first having signed the kid from Hoboken - Frank Sinatra - for the part. The way Kazan remembers Spiegel is ambivalent to say the least. He says:

In came this terrible terrible guy that I'm very fond of now named Sam Spiegel. And he was down on his uppers. He was broke- he had trouble He needed something that paid him produce and so forth, but, he also needed something to do.

He may be very fond of him now, but old men often mellow in their feelings toward each other. Kazan went on to redeem himself in the eyes of Hollywood, and Spiegel went on to produce "Bridge on the River Kwai", "Arab Lawrence" (haha), and a sizable chunk of "Ben Hur." That kind of resume tends to make hatefulness mellow into orneriness, and sonofabitchiness soften into eccentricity... at least in memory, and in those days apparently Spiegel could be very ornery. In the interview, Kazan claims the screenwriter Bud Schulberg wanted to go to New York and kill Spiegel., while Kazan fought with the producer about everything, throughout the shooting. The famed minimalism of the taxicab scene ("I coulda been a contender") he said was not a stroke of directorial insight, but a last-resort technique made necessary by Spiegel's total failure to provide a proper set. All they had was the back seat and an interior shell of a taxi. Spiegel apparently "forgot" even to provide the rear-projection apparatus. So they put venetian blinds in the rear window and rigged some flashing lights to simulate passing traffic, and just let the two actors - act! It was all they could do. That or cancel the shoot. By this point in the shooting schedule Brando and Steiger both knew their characters, and they could perform the scene with conviction. Kazan uncharacteristically waived aside all credit for the brilliance of the scene, saying there was nothing to direct: he just let the two men sit there and exercise their craft. He says it was simply Bud Schulberg's script that shone through unfettered, and burned the moment into film history. The director he claims he had nothing to do.
That isn't strictly true however. Someone had to keep a rein on the talent. In his autobiography Brando claimed the taxi scene was improvised, but this turns out to be false. Brando did start improvising, and Rod Steiger followed suit, but Kazan warned them sternly "Stop the shit!" and they stuck to the script after that.
Kazan says the film is about redemption: about a mixed up kid from Hoboken with a troubled conscience, who meets an innocent Roman Catholic girl (Eva Marie Saint) and is redeemed by the relationship. In the interview, Kazan says "What could be more basic than that?"

When he [Brando] plays those scenes with her [Eva Marie Saint] I'm broken up, I break up. Ah...ah...that one person should need so much from another person in the way of tenderness and all that. We all do, don't we, we all marry- hopefully marry or hopefully hook up with some lady that's gonna make us feel- we're ok and we're better and all that. We search for it and we want it and crave it and all that and sometimes it happens and sometimes it happens for a while and something in that basic story is what stirs people; not the social political thing so much as the human element in it.

Is that not a succint definition of what the Course calls a special relationship? But whatever Kazan felt about the redeeming virtue of relationships, we glimpse another side of him in the foreword to the film which claims that the “film will exemplify the way self-appointed tyrants can defeated by right-thinking people in a vital democracy" That larger purpose of course is mostly grandstanding and political posturing. It is well known that Kazan a couple of years before had given evidence to senator Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC. He was quite widely perceived as a "canary" among the Hollywood community, whose "singing" had cost many of them their careers. His allegorization of the HUAC in the form of the "hearings" in "On the waterfront" and his "redemption" of protagonist Terry Malloy (Brando) who gives evidence before the hearings is probably supposed to demonstrate that speaking the truth is not necessarily selling out, and it can lead to the downfall of tyrants.

That does raise as many problems as it solves though. First it does nothing to address the more fundamental question of what is wrong with a society where tyrants can rise to power in the first place. This is an aspect of the illusion which plays a large role in world affairs. As I write this, the current "evil" tyrant is Iran. Probably tomorrow it will be someone else. Second, the gang against whom Malloy testifies are a group of local buffoons -- the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They fall all over each other, speak in cliches, and generally behave as if they wandered onto the set accidentally from a neighboring cartoon comedy production. One critic wrote that their "headquarters," a ridiculous wooden shack on the waterfront, looks like a "clubhouse for the Hardy boys." Bringing down that particular dynasty did not seem that difficult. One call from their mothers to come home and wash-up for dinner would have achieved the same result.

Anyway don't let me leave you with the impression I experience it as anything less than a great movie. I think like most such memorable works it survives and transcends, despite the circumstances, not because of them. The muddled confluence of ego somehow achieves form and solidifies. What results has a life of its own. One can dig up enough dirt to tarnish anything that shines... but still it shines on. We cannot change it. "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."

Dymo-Labelers

2006-06-10T01:04:00.000-04:00

I get asked a lot about Flatland, presumably because I talk about it a lot. It is a short novel by Edwin Abbott written from the point of view of a citizen of a two-dimensional universe (a flat land). In this parallel universe there are rules and regulations, cultures and traditions, taboos and norms, and of course -- perceptions, and a world-view and a philosophy built upon them. The author however is given an "extraordinary" glimpse of the third dimension, and upon his return to two-dimensional normality he is a changed man. Unfortunately his insistence on a greater reality beyond mere flatness brands him as a madman and a heretic. He can produce no "evidence" to support his claims, and he ends up committed to prison for his refusal to renounce his ideas. As the narrative draws to a close he sits in his prison cell and seems to be at peace with his incarceration, as he begins musing on the possibility of other dimensions beyond the third.
The book is satire, and is usually branded as "social" satire, with the target of the humor ostensibly being stuffy Victorian society. In fact though, the central premise is one of intolerance and closed thinking of all kinds, and failure to think outside the conventional limits.
I think it was Spock (Mr. , not Dr.) who said something like "Two is the most unlikely number in the universe." His point was -- an oddity or a singularity is possible and quite probable, but if you discover another similar one, then it is no longer singular, and the probability that there are only two -- is then very small.
That concept certainly applies to dimensions; but a strange thing seems to happen in university philosophy departments when I mention the possibility that the Boolean analytical approach to describing God might be just as restrictive and restricted as the Flatland approach to describing the world. What happens is: satire is labeled as just that -- satire -- and placed on a mental shelf neatly out of the way in the "interesting but irrelevant" section of the library. There is no move to see the satire as possibly uncovering a truth of any kind. It's sort of like this -- "Yes I think I read that when I was a teenager. Look, what's your point? Why are we discussing fiction when we are trying to discover truth?"
And to be honest there is a kind of vulnerability in invoking the ideas of others (fact or fiction) as a position or a defense during any kind of dialog. The mere fact that a concept is pre-existent makes it categorizable and probably already categorized. We categorize in order to protect ourselves from the now. We dilute the meaningfulness of existence by sticking labels on everything. Have you ever wondered why the Dymo-labeler is such a successful business product? It helps mankind do what he has to do in order to obscure God.
Today is a mish-mash post of disconnected thoughts. But today in general was like a ripe glowing orange, waiting to be plucked. You know? Some days the world seems bigger than we can handle and largely hostile. Other days, like today, it seems manageable and friendly, obtainable and sweet. One major relief was the absence of earthquakes. I've had a lot of dreams about a major earthquake in LA on June 9th. Didn't happen, and I'm not sorry. Goodnight.

Heavy Rocks

2006-06-05T22:47:00.000-04:00

Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens... Are these abominations ... really evidence of an intelligent creator? ... The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. [Bertrand Russell: Why I am Not A Christian]

It does no good to assert that God may not be all powerful and thus not able to prevent evil. He can create a universe and yet is conveniently unable to do what the fire-department can do -- rescue a baby from a burning building. [B.C. Johnson: God and the Problem of Evil]

1. If God exists, then there would be no evil in the world.
2. There is evil in the world.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
[Epicurus: The "Inconsistent Triad"]

If divine laws are right just because God says they are right, then God could tell us to murder or steal, and by definition it would be right. On the other hand, if God simply informs us of their rightness, that implies He is not the source or cause of such rightness, but merely an enforcer. In other words He is not omnipotent. [A common objection to the ethical theory of Divine Law]

Could God create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it? [The paradox of Omnipotence. ] (A brief explanation: if He could make such a rock, He could not lift it, so He would not be omnipotent, or all-powerful. If He was not able to make such a rock, He would similarly not be omnipotent.)

If one less person had died in the holocaust, would we still have learned a lesson from it? [A common response to the theodicy that we cannot judge suffering as evil, since it may be part of God's greater purpose]

Birds of a feather

2006-06-02T17:26:00.000-04:00

Still on the topic of atheism in college philosophy departments, I could not help noticing that there was very little camaraderie among the faculty. Every faculty member and teaching assistant seemed to have only a kind of murky peripheral interest in their colleagues' ideas. Perhaps they were all too absorbed in their own thought processes? Or perhaps there is a lot of pressure to publish or perish, and ideas are too valuable to spread around? More likely it is a natural response to the tendency of people of faith to congregate. I cannot help feeling that on some level atheists are uncomfortable being "joiners". They wouldn't want (as Groucho said) to belong to any club that would accept them as members. Group activity of any kind is a sign of some kind of community between souls: something an atheist cannot subscribe to. Previously I used the term "church" in relation to critical thinking because I do see it as a kind of blind faith. But adherents to that "faith" all vigorously deny any element of faith in their thinking, so they are obliged not to congregate. It would smell of church-worship or some faith-based activity. It is a fact that the philosophy department in a college is often a sort of poor orphan-child. There are doubtless a number of good reasons for this; in particular this is an age where degrees in "air conditioning and heating," or "criminology" are considered valuable, and liberal-arts is seen as superfluous. (that pendulum is starting to swing back again, though.) But perhaps a more basic and inescapable reason is the self-isolating nature of secularity. Great critical-thinking minds, even if they think alike, apparently can't discuss it, and without cohesiveness or group-spirit, departments seem destined to languish.

Critical Thinking

2006-05-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

I took only one course at college this past semester, to remain on the books as an active student while thinking a lot about what I want to do in the future. Last semester I took 5 courses (and made the Dean's list... yeaah!), but the second half of the semester was a struggle with relevance. The thing is that the philosophy dept of this university, and (I'm told) most modern universities, is profoundly secular - in fact outright atheistic. An atheistic framework means not only is the curriculum slanted against faith, but even the modes of inquiry (the tools of the trade) are biased. Modern universities seem to worship "critical thinking", which is an excellent way of analyzing the form of the illusion -- but not the content. By restricting the currency of truth in this way, the truth is inherently equated with the scarcity principle. Truth, in a nutshell is all about "If this then that." "If not that therefore this." The rules and restrictions are precisely aligned with experience. Other modes of discourse are ridiculed if they might contradict experience. So it is a rather self-serving little Flatland of two-dimensional rules and possibilities. Nothing else is allowed the possibility of existence because nothing else can be perceived or deduced. It is a confining all, and all can be explained or should be explicable by some subset or aspect of this all. That which cannot is not fact, therefore not truth. This is the church of critical thinking. Such belief in scarcity is not belief in God for the two are incompatible. So I find myself asking rather sadly: do I want or need to continue such a line of study? It is without meaning, and can have no ultimate outcome. This semester I studied simple college physics - which was refreshing because at least it knows its limitations. It only claims to be about the measurable aspects of illusion. Learning about it is a pleasant mental excursion, like solving a crossword.