car si l'on me perd...

forgive both the drama and vagueness. perhaps that's what blogs are for. i don't appreciate either one of those, but i can find no other way to discuss something important to me, and i need to mention it here.
to heighten the drama, and perhaps the fun for me, i'm thinking of writing a letter to her personally. this lover has never had a gender, but it feels more like a girl than a guy to me. maybe i think this way because my toughest break-up, as i was telling a friend tonight, was with a girl, not a boyfriend. this is by far the toughest breakup yet. i've been lucky in my limited romantic life. a few boys have come and gone, and now one is here to stay. my lost loves haven't been lovers.


but i could swear by your expression
that the pain down in your soul
was the same as the one down in mine
that's the pain
that cuts a straight line through the heart
we called it love
-- "origin of love" from hedwig and the angry inch


dear lover,

it's over. i know you will continue to haunt me -- breton, right? who am i? whom do i haunt? -- to live with me, but as something i soothe and release, not as my sole connection to existence. you are no longer my way of doing things and my reason for doing them. you are still in my heart though our romance is done.

i try to remember your good intentions. you came to me when i was very young, maybe even 7 or 8. 5 or 6? truthfully, i cannot remember a time in my life without you there.

you knew what i couldn't articulate: that i wanted to die. that i found living to be a hopeless and stressful bind. and you cared about my predicament, sincerely. you rushed in to help. you gave me another option, to live for you. were you the mephistopheles to my faust? i could live if i gave you my soul? you chide me for this comparison. that is a cliché. it is too dramatic. you should look up faust; you're not completely sure if this is accurate. i'm sure you could do better. oh, my love, i have been so dedicated to you, so persuaded by you, governed by your priorities and frightened by your wrath. i have been so enmeshed with you that it is hard to live another way. but things are not the same between us anymore. i see that you're sad, angry, and frightened, i feel those in you, but you can't deny that we are growing apart, and i know that it is for the best.

i liked having the sense of purpose you gave me. we were good together, and people acknowledged us, telling me how smart and precocious and exceptional i was for loving you. i liked the sense of dedication we were building to each other. if i stuck with you, if i spent all of my time in our relationship, cultivating you, giving you knowledge and interpretations and thinking and writing and good grades and french tutoring on the side and being in museums and lots of time pondering what it all really means; if i could come up with penetrating analyses in all moments of sleeping and waking, i would be able to tolerate and even justify living. you told me that we would take the shit of the earth and turn it into glorious theoretical books. together, we would make life more than tolerable; it would be worth living through. you and me against the world.

you wanted to love me. you wanted to see me live and thrive. you believed in the power of ideas and creativity, the dedication of sitting, learning, and thinking in new ways. no doubt these are wholesome things and they're how you saved me. but, my love, your personality is too extreme. i am still not completely sure why. i wanted you to just be loving, to enjoy things with me, to find meaning and friendship with me, but it got complicated. you had a firm idea of the kind of lover i needed to be for you. we have been in one of those relationships where the man, let's call that you, is controlling and paranoid and afraid of losing his love, so he follows her around and tells her how to dress, what to say, how to behave. you said you were just loving me, but you gave me standards, and made it clear that i should die if i couldn't meet them even for a second. after taking the french exam in grad school, and being worried about if i passed, since half of it was much harder than i expected, i genuinely felt, at your prodding, at my agreement with you, that it would be such a disgrace to fail that i should commit suicide. that there would be no other way. and then i passed it. it was like you got fed, and you were happy again.

you learned how to love from my mother. where else would you learn how to behave? you taught me what had been taught to you, that love is entangled with perfect behavior and performance, and if any of our unspoken rules are breached, the only thing to do is to berate me, to make me want to die. my life has been in your hands. you would save me from dying, but if our exacting strategies did not seem to work -- if i was not the best all the time, ahead of everything, having a wonderful time inspired by my own great ideas -- you were quick to remain me of the other side of the bargain, that if i didn't match what we agreed on i should die.

and so a lot of things in my life, like studying anything, writing papers, doing well in college and grad school, just meeting with a professor in her office, became the circumstances that would justify my life or signal that i was inadequate and need to die or at least hurt myself as punishment. why couldn't i live up to our agreement? why couldn't i just be brilliant and happy all the time? why couldn't all of my thoughts, my enormous, all-encompassing dedication, so strong it carried moral weight like a good priest's concentration on scripture, my reading and writing and creative work, my comments in class, the grad school acceptances i was supposed to have -- why couldn't these things calm me and fulfill me and delight me the way you always said they would?

if they didn't -- or rather when they didn't -- it couldn't possibly be your fault, because you were my protector, my best and only friend. then it must be my fault, i'd conclude, and i would want to die. why couldn't i just make our agreement work out? why couldn't i live up to you? why couldn't i resemble my projections of everyone else? you told me that everything would be fixed, that life would not only be livable but delightful, if i effortlessly became the next rosalind krauss. after all, she ended her book on modern sculpture with a quote from proust, and when i was 13 proust was our honeymoon, the first gift you ever gave me. some lovers give roses; you gave me swann's way. that was "our thing" in middle school and high school. it had purpose in it, unlike the dry, pathetic routine i lived, surrounded by incomprehensible teens with ensor-like masks for faces.

i've never been a platonist, but my intention in high school, college, and even some of grad school, was to make myself whole again by fusing with you. you held and supported my unspoken belief in plato's origin of love (or at least in the version of it in hedwig and the angry inch!). in intimate moments, when we cooed to each other, we agreed that once we had been one, a child of the sun or moon, and then were separated due to the wrath of the gods, and that i needed to spend my life attempting to fuse with you at pain of death. all of my encounters -- with museums, libraries, artwork, classrooms -- were supposed to both represent and consummate the glory of our union. and if they couldn't do this, effortlessly every time, devastation and annihilation were my only alternatives. our promise was broken from the beginning, because how could so much risk accompanied everything. union, ultimate consummation with ideas, like embodying the transcendence of a malevich, mondriaan, or even a pollock, is a rare occurrence, and it is too difficult for life to depend on this. is this what you mean to do, or was it just a natural consequence of our impossible pact?

i've been learning that between dreams and fleeting moments of fusion and fears of annihilation lies my actual life. and this actual life is worth living in, even when i don't meet our standards for how to live it. i feel a strange combination of relief and pain at leaving you. you are still in me, still part of me somehow, but you don't run my life. you're not my belief, my god, my only reason to live.

now i have an actual love of my life. we are getting married. we are living together, for each other, but with no false and empty promises like the ones that, despite your sincere caring for me, gave me. all we, my fiancé and i, want from one another is our humanity. i adore his humanity, and i know he feels the same way about mine, as much as you and i revile it when it doesn't conform to our brilliance-transcendence pact. there are no expectations and no fears of being annihilated with him. whether we're kissing, joking, watching transformers, taking a walk, chatting about todd in the shadows or spending time at a museum exhibit together, nothing is required of us except to be here and feel as we do. you have never been able to give me that, and that is love. i know you wanted something great for us, but it was never possible, and it wasn't even good for me. i could never fuse with you and i am done trying. i'd rather be myself, moment to moment, here.

sometimes i wish i could just banish you from my life, while at other times i feel sad and guilty that i have abandoned our attempts at fusing together. my real life is somewhere in between these two. you're still with me, because even though you were not a good lover, you are my oldest and best friend. you were my only friend when no one else would be my friend. you gave me reasons to live when i couldn't find any. i think you meant to protect me, to make me such a great and brilliant person that life couldn't hurt me as it hurt my parents and as it killed my grandmother. life led to people attacking my mother and not appreciating my father. my lovely, sensitive grandmother couldn't survive it all -- she was too kind and lovely for this world, i was somehow told. and i come from all of these people. i was worried i was marked for the devastation and failure that plagued my family, and i know you cared about me so much you tried to save me from this fate, to give me a path to happiness. you are often unkind, but i think you have been trying to save me. i appreciate your steadfast love, but our relationship has never been healthy, and you know it.

the question now is: what do i do with you? we are separated, bleeding and staring at each other. you feel wronged that i am moving on. how can she be happy with this chump who doesn't know half as much about the arts as i do? you cry indignantly. how can you be happy being a little shit when i've tried to save you from that? you shout at me. you still taunt me with threats of failure and it's scary. somehow, though, we need to peacefully coexist. because i'm still here and i know you don't leave easily.

you can stand next to me at times, we can have a chat. we have memories. we have a history. we have fear and resentment of one another, and mutual tenderness too. but i won't be your lover anymore. i refuse to even try to fuse with you. i don't want you in my bed. but you're still a part of me in some way. how can we get along without being lovers? can i tolerate you being there, and can you understand that i don't feel the same way about you? traversing these questions is our breakup. i know you need to kick, scream, and mourn the end of us. maybe i need that too. i want you to know that i care about your dedication to me, and i care about what you've done in the past, but i am done being hopelessly devoted to you. i'm moving on.

best wishes ;-)
rooster

What Makes You Buddhaful

Gee, my last post here was so soul searching. And there is so much to say. But right now I will not say it. Except that Fusion and I are moving in together starting this Saturday. :-) We fell in love with the second apartment we looked at. We moved fast and got approved yesterday. We're filling out the lease paperwork today, during normal hours, and make sure our broker gets everything by Friday morning. So that's what I've been up to.

In the meantime, I've been de-stressing by writing a parody song, and that's what I put here for your contemplation. Be on the lookout for the 10 paramis and 4 brahma viharas as well as the Kuan Yin mantra. I managed to include them all in the song. Fusion gave me some good tips like the last line. I made him listen to the finished product before he went to bed. :-)


What Makes You Buddhaful

To the tune of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful”

You’re insecure
Don’t know what for
Your sila stops you from acts I abhor
Your wisdom’s deep,
Resolve’s so steep
You’re gonna make it across the far shore

Devas, bodhissatvas and yogis see it
All of the Buddhists but you

Baby your grasp of the paramis is so refined,
Your dana offerings so large that they blow my mind,
You are more loving than Gandhi and King combined
You don’t know, Kuan Yin
You don’t know you’re Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
The deep composure of your equanimity
Your dedication to practice, your energy
You don’t know, Kuan Yin,
You don’t know you’re Buddhaful
Oh oh
Paramis make you Buddhaful

You’ve got it wrong,
Your heart is strong.
You have the patience to listen to this song.
You’ve renounced crimes
Over lifetimes
You have the honesty to critique my rhymes

Brahmins and outcasts alike can see it
All kinds of people but you

Baby with boundless compassion you overflow
You listen to all my whining so I would know
Mudita gives you a lovely and radiant glow
And ergo
Oh oh
I conclude you’re Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
Despite my tantrums you still have serenity
Your lovingkindness prevents you from hitting me
So I know, Kuan Yin,
I know that you’re Buddhaful
Oh oh
Divine Abodes are Buddhaful

Namo na-namo na-namo namo
Namo guan shri yin pu sa
Namo na-namo na-namo namo
Namo guan shri yin pu sa

Baby your grasp of the paramis is so refined,
Your dana offerings so large that they blow my mind,
You are more loving than Gandhi and King combined
You don’t know, Kuan Yin
You don’t know you’re Buddhaful

Baby with boundless compassion you overflow
You listen to all my whining so I would know
Mudita gives you a lovely and radiant glow
And ergo
Oh oh
I conclude you’re Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
Despite my tantrums you still have serenity
Your lovingkindness prevents you from hitting me
So I know, Kuan Yin,
Paramis make you Buddhaful
Oh oh
Divine Abodes are Buddhaful
Oh oh
Kuan Yin you’re so Buddhaful!

a vehicle for blessing

So while I am going to attempt sleep, I was finishing Ajahn Sucitto's chapter on patience in his amazing book on the paramis and I found another encapsulation of (my) practice, all the things I was referring to in my last post. So of course I must quote it here.

And you can even feel respect for the ungrateful and the exasperating. They help you wear out your addiction to self view, to having your own way. And they help you to lose your fascination or irritation with the personalities of other people, and all that which is just kamma and no real self at all. Then you say 'thank you' to pointless situations and people who irritate you. This is the perfection of patience: it can make one's life a vehicle for blessing.

I am incredibly impatient, so when I am waiting for a subway (train or sandwich), in a line, waiting to cross the street, I can say "Yes! I get to wear out my addiction to self view!" *sigh* No one said it was an easy path...

many a refuge

They go to many a refuge, to mountains, forests, parks, trees, and shrines: people threatened with danger. That's not the secure refuge, that's not the highest refuge, that's not the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.

Sleeping issues again, so I thought I'd post briefly.

I go to many a refuge. I look at images and I talk to people, and I often ask, them or myself, "how do you do it? what gets you through the day? how does life become bearable for you?" I don't find persuasive answers. Usually people, threatened with danger, recite a script they are stuck in. "Well I'm going to solve life's problems by living in a city." or "by living an isolated life" or "by being immersed in the classics of art and literature" or "by excelling in sports" or "by following my dream until I 'make it.'" Usually people don't even say these answers, but it's under the surface of their speech.

It reminds me of a time I was with my mother and a friend of hers. My mother was saying that it is too hard to go into music (as if this were the real cause of her problems) and that you may as well not do it. Her friend indignantly replied, "but what if [insert famous musician here] decided it was too hard? then what?" One philosophy based on bitterness and blame and the other based on an unconscious investment in ideas of genius and artistic destiny. Two seemingly opposite sides of the coin of delusion. And as an unenlightened being, I have my own side of this multidimensional coin, my own prejudices and attachments to them that I try to unearth.

It's just useful to look at other people. Arguing about delusions over coffee. I can't say it's a dumb thing to do. It's just human, and so it's often missing the mark. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a college friend at a bookstore. She was drawing diagrams trying to convince me not to hate human nature. If we can reason, we are salvageable, we have an inherent worth, she said to me. I would have none of it. I had all my reasons set in stone about why humans completely suck. And then a woman came over to us and recommended we read one of those sappy motivational best sellers, and I took this as proof of my argument. These days, following the river of change and development, I don't believe in either alternative. And I'm happier for it.

There are all kinds of people I could potentially relate to, but when I search around in my little universe,  Buddhist monastics make exceptional sense. So do layteachers, but sometimes the wisdom of the monks and nuns really gets me. You'd think it would be hard to relate to people with such a different lifestyle. But they're so freaking honest. They struggle with life and practice like me. They don't gloss over it, because there's no need for pretense when you're a monastic. It's just real shit. Take this excerpt from Ajahn Sucitto on patience:

The reality of Dhamma practice is that, as much as we would like to be pure and free, we have to learn to develop patience with our attachments and passions, and our views and opinions about them.

Fuck it, man. That's my life. This bald English guy apparently knows what it's like to be an engaged twenty something girl studying, living, and moving in the city. Because he knows the mind. You don't need to compare dhamma to scientific studies of the mind -- just watch the mind on and off the cushion. All you have to do, the small and large task, is see what that instrument does. I want to be pure and free. I have a deep aspiration to awaken and I believe in it. I don't know what lifetime it will happen in (personally, I am inclined to trust the Buddha about rebirth, but of course I have no proof), but this path has an end I'm pursuing, and that's Nibbana. Stress reduction is fine, desirable, but I'm on the path to awakening, and I have the sincere aspiration to be free, and I don't need to expect that to happen in a certain timeframe or in an understandable way for the aspiration to be strong and to feel real.

So when I sit on the cushion, all that peace stuff is great, really, and, as Sucitto says, I'm sitting with my attachments and passions, my conditioning doing its thing over and over and over again. And on top of that I have the view that it shouldn't be that way, that I'm not "doing it right" because I'm experiencing what we all have, an unenlightened mind, and the frustration that accompanies it. Sometimes I just say "hey Mara, I know you're here, thanks for showing me these things so clearly." I don't love Mara, but more and more we can have tea together. I do appreciate the clarity she brings me at times, the learning opportunities. Here they are again, these are the things the mind does. Thanks for showing me.

Silence. It's so quiet. There's so much space here. So much erupting and flowing of new life.
Then Mara shows herself to me again.

It's unromantic. All this junk, too, is Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, the four noble truths (suffering and its cause are one and two), the eightfold path, and this is a good reason to have compassion for it, however hard that may be. Sometimes what I do is notice: awareness isn't blaming. Awareness doesn't know blame. My mind has to work for that; it is not intrinsically there.

That's the secure refuge, that, the highest refuge, that is the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.

Renounceathon Adventures

Happy 2556, the year in the Buddhist calendar.
I am having a lot of trouble sleeping, so I thought I'd write a few things.
First, I am getting hungry and craving bacon pancakes due to an excellent adventure time song and video. If I am up late enough, I could get banana pancakes and bacon at my local diner, which is excellent.

However, I can't get my typical ginger ale with them since I have sworn off soda for a month. I decided to participate in Santi Forest Monastery's 2013 Renounceathon. This Theravada monastery in Australia is doing a month long fundraiser that also helps you practice. You choose something to renounce, which can also mean doing less of something, or, for something more abstract, holding the intention (like renouncing thinking about the past, or unwise speech). People can donate to your cause and you can also contribute to the monastery. I was excited when I found out about this because I wanted to find more ways to practice. I like to up the ante.

I chose soda for several reasons. I wanted something that wouldn't be too difficult but that I would notice. I also wanted something concrete. If you're renouncing a type of thinking, it's too hard for me, because whenever that thinking comes up, I'd say, "oh, damn it, you're supposed to renounce that." So I find it more convenient to choose a physical thing I can stay away from and then watch what happens to the mind from there. Soda is a good thing for me to renounce because it's not good for me, and I actually really like it, especially diet soda. I probably have diet coke several times a week if not once a day. I'm also into diet ginger ale and diet mountain dew. So it makes a difference in my life to forego these things, but at the same time, I can enjoy water, selzer, my favorite diet peach snapple, fruit juices.

So far it's not a problem. (Yes, I know it is only three days, but I am excited about the rest of the month.) I like doing this. I like being reminded of practice in a daily life way that isn't on the cushion. It's easy for Western practitioners to limit practice to the cushion, or even to noticing the breath as you walk. That's all well and good, but Dhamma is vast. So this keeps me in touch. It's only been three days, but I feel like it's strengthening my confidence. I'm trying to notice what I actually do well instead of just being mean to myself. As it turns out, I have a lot to feel pleased about in my actions, which are often wholesome, efficient, even creative. So with renunciation, I feel like "I can do this." I also notice that as I formally renounce one thing, it is easier to adopt that as a frame of mind and do less of other things. It's sort of a positive slippery slope. That might be the biggest advantage of such a practice. On a related note, when I'm not renouncing, like buying many books for my Kindle, I notice it more, and notice the emotions and thoughts behind it. I'm such a book fiend that this is my addiction. It's like a mini rush. I feel excited and accomplished when I get one. Eventually I'm able to stop myself. So we'll see how this goes...

I had a very interesting experience with this tonight. I went to a local market to pick up rent money and dinner. This market is a block from where I live and has an Allpoints ATM which means I don't have a bank fee. So I always go there to get rent, and I get food while I'm at it. As I was standing in the line with my sesame noodles and chicken, strawberry and blueberry mix, and WATER (ha!), I noticed a man in the other aisle with three, count 'em, three bottles of diet mountain dew. This is my favorite soda ever and I prefer to have bottles to cans. So my greatest temptation was before me. The three bottles, lying in the man's basket, looked radiant with their urine-like yellow-green glow. I had a variety of strange delusional thoughts that went something like this:

"That man has diet mountain dew! I am not having that because I am renouncing that! Ha! Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
"You know, that guy is pretty fat and disheveled. Maybe it's really good I'm renouncing the dew. Maybe he should do the same thing..."
"Oh, those look so beautiful. He has three. He can't possibly need three. Why not give me one? Wait..."

I did not identify with these thoughts and was amused.
Not only am I announcing, I'm also preparing to do some dana I am really excited about. I have a lot of Buddhist books around the house that I either have read or don't read. These days I have both an iPhone and a Kindle Fire and in general I prefer reading Buddhist books on my devices instead of in print. So I put all the Buddhist books I wanted to give away in a small suitcase. (Putting books in suitcases is a surprisingly controversial thing and I will discuss that another time. To phrase it another way: there are a lot of bizarre and difficult people at a certain library...More to come.) I plan to take them to my meditation center and donate them all to the lending library we have now in the small room. Unfortunately, this mini library is in the same room as the dedicated practice sit and it tends to distract me when I am attempting to do walking meditation...

So whether I drag the suitcase over there today or tomorrow, I have a sense of fullness. Everyone benefits, because I have so many books it's nice to get rid of some and now fellow Buddhists can enjoy them. I am considering attempting to sell other books to local used bookstores. They'd be in a good place and I might get a little money. However, I feel less comfortable doing that with Dhamma books. In fact, many of my Dhamma books are published by monasteries and they say that no one is allowed to profit financially from those pure dana books. I have plenty of Buddhist books I've paid for, but if I donate them all, they all get a great home and different people can borrow them.

the search

lately it's really been on my mind that i did not choose the dhamma.

in a relative sense, i did choose it. i'm the one who ended up reading alan watts, jon kabat-zinn, tara brach when my former friend hellcat thought it was weird. i remember when we went to see our favorite comedy group of the time and i had alan watts essays with me. are you crazy? she asked something like that. nothing would deter me. i'm the one who found meditation and its insights to be an incredible blessing while i was struggling. i'm the one who plunged into my first retreat the summer after i started to practice, less than a year in, and i absolutely fell in love with it. i'm the one who reads and listens to ajahn for fun. i'm proud to express my love of dhamma and i've taken a lot of steps to put it in my life. i have a perfectionist streak that feels i could do more, but there's no doubt that by my mid twenties now (!) i am a very dedicated yogi and that this is my life path.

at the same time, there's something that's been happening on the ultimate level that is hard to articulate. dhamma has taken over my life. when i was looking for something to help me out, i had no idea i was looking for it. as a kid, i never envisioned myself coming to identify as buddhist. it still feels kind of random. i was raised to be a supposedly erudite, culturally refined jew, and now i'm taking refuge in buddha dhamma sangha? umm, what?

at some level, to refer back to my blog, the dhamma is my natural unfolding. or, the dhamma is naturally unfolding me. whether i'm doing a lot of formal sitting or not, buddha dhamma itself is pulling back my layers and teaching me what i need to know. i remember chas quoting one of the forest teachers (i think) at several young adult retreats. he said something about how you just put yourself in the way of dhamma and it unfolds in its own time according to your kamma, and that's it. just watch it flower. i remember doing walking meditation on the annex porch and being so struck by this. now i know i was struck by this because this is my life. and it's not in my control. the dhamma found me and mercifully, tenderly refused to let me go.

in some ways, my personality is the same, but less encumbered. the zany sense of humor, the inappropriate jokes, the love of modern art and francophilia. but in other ways, i feel quite different to myself. i don't hate all people. i've gotten into something called nonviolent communication and have some ability to empathize with myself and others. i'm much more fascinated by what i see on the street and feel no more need to have brilliant observations about everything. i remember rebecca saying at my last retreat, "meditation lets you be an ordinary person, and it's such a relief."

the dhamma is continuing to bring me to the ground, to the soothing earth that the buddha relied upon when mara questioned him. it reminds me of the simon and garfunkel song "the sparrow" in which no part of nature will help the dying bird because it's concerned about its reputation and other such things. until -- "i will," said the earth. "for all that's created returns unto me. from dust were ye made and dust ye shall be." the tenderness of the inevitable, the strong sweetness of this space that can take anything.

i don't want to get caught up in concepts of fate, in things as 'meant to be.' i don't believe in this. it's usually self-seving, as in, was meant to be great and that's why i was chosen to do blah blah blah. (see reality show contestants talking about how their entire life has led to their audition. or, rather, don't.) buddhism is not fatalistic because of its emphasis on present-moment unfolding. at the same time, i'm straining for words. the dhamma found me, and it wasn't going to give up. everything in my life leads me back to it, like it's a homing device, a compass in the woods, the north star. and that's the point.

i was doing a sort of meditation/mat trip spontaneously, and i could see quite clearly that in all my self-blame and my difficult, isolating childhood experiences, i wanted to die. everything was about deeply wanting to die or managing to try to live, like hanging off a precipice and grabbing a piece of wood with your teeth. i wanted to bite something so hard it would stop the inevitable fall into oblivion. like camus' clémence, i loved high places. but i always knew i was falling off of them, and, of course, blamed myself for it. i'm stunned that i clung on so tenaciously. i can't believe i have made it to a quarter of a century now and i have zero suicide attempts. no drugs, no smoking, no drinking, no gambling. i do like food very much, so maybe that's an addiction. i've always been into it. but i do okay. i used to self harm but not very deeply. i was never close to death or coated in blood; i couldn't stand it.

but i can tell you with certainty that at the bottom of my life for at least twenty years, i found it to be an impossible trap, an exercise in futile misery, and even in the books and papers and museums -- perhaps especially during this nice experiences because my emotions were heightened, i was more self-connected, i'd get anxiety -- i actually wanted to die. while i am obnoxiously intellectual, i also consider myself a devotional type, a puppy. i love something and that's the end of it. i'll relate to it forever, no matter what. i'm obsessive, compulsive, though undiagnosed. i've preferred to call it passionate.

and what seemed to keep me alive, what i've always been living for, is a way of being i could sink my teeth into, a spot where i could find meaning, significance, authenticity, but also ease, grace, love. a space that would open life up and make it worthwhile. i tried to make this my academic life, but i've learned with plenty of suffering that these are burdens that studying things like dali and bunuel movies and forgotten early french performance art simply can't hold.

but the dhamma can do this. the dhamma is this. and so, in a subtle sense, without fully knowing it, i've been looking for the dhamma my whole life. and somehow by the end of college i embarked on a journey of finding it, a journey that gives me incredible challenges and rewards today and forever. i don't know why my colleagues and some of my friends don't follow the dhamma, but i do know at a deep level that i couldn't live without it, that i've actually always been waiting for my chance to engage it, and that whatever it brings me i need to bear to reach a new stage of happiness. my reality had to catch up with my yearning, and then i could start to practice. and, as chogyam trungpa said, once you start, you have to finish.

dhamma makes every moment worthwhile, not by changing it or by denying it, but by illuminating it. it restores clarity and value to suffering, which after all, is a noble truth. when i pour myself into dhamma, it doesn't break.  it's not like holding on to a precipice. the more you love it, the more ground opens up. it's more like finding a little patch of land and sitting or lying there while everything unfolds within and around you.

brel sings about "the quest" as an "impossible dream," an "inaccessible star." while i love the macho-sensitive poetry of brel's lyrics, the dhamma isn't this at all. what i find fascinating is that you can put the same level of passion into dhamma that you put into other things, but instead of caving under the weight, or "still burning after burning out" as brel sings, it makes everything lighter and cooler. (nibbana actually means extinguishment, cooling down.) buddha dhamma actually opens up more space, because that's what there is. it's tender and uncompromising at the same time. reality can't be altered by your delusions about it, but it can love you, and little by little you can enter a kind relationship with it. it's there for you to do this. it does not want, but it wants nothing more than to relate to you in this deep, authentic way.

i keep feeling like t.s. eliot in prufrock -- "it is impossible to say just what i mean." but i also feel like i've said what i mean to the best of my ability, and awareness and i, we have an intuitive inner knowing of what this means. a knowing worth awkward words. a knowing that actually insists on a penetrative love for the world. and a knowing that loves back.

may all beings receive the blessings of my life.

Spirituality and Learning, super long part 2

...coeur je connaissais trop;
j'avais l'oeil du berger
et le coeur de l'agneau
-- Jacques Brel, "L'enfance" 

So, in talking about my relationship to Palmer's book, "To Know and Be Known," I'd like to take a really subjective approach, because this is my flippin' blog. I could spend time explaining how Palmer takes spiritual terms and applies them to learning or go through all of his themes, but I'd like to express these things obliquely by simply writing about what points affected me the most and why. I'm most interested in what main points I can take from this reading and apply to my own process of integrating dhamma and study.



Palmer writes a lot about truth, which sounds like a problematic notion. Who has the right answer then; who knows the truth? How can one talk about truth when learning is about seeing multiple perspectives and dismantling received ideas? Palmer is careful about this. I'm sure his book coming out when postmodernism was getting big has something to do with it. For him, truth is relatedness or community: "Truth is between us, in relationship, to be found in the dialogue of knowers and knowns who are understood as independent but accountable selves." By writing, "truth is between us," he is explicit that the point of learning is not in having or claiming to have a superior or clever interpretation. That's not the truth. That's part of the relationship, one facet of things.

One thing I've learned is that when someone has a particularly compelling argument, people don't want to 'concede to the other' and they want to argue against it. This can be annoying when you're the arguer! But as the person receiving the interpretation, I do this intentionally, to hone my skills. There are certain writers who are incredibly clever and persuasive and have dominated my field, and while I acknowledge my debt to them, I want to have the capacity to argue, to make space for something else, especially if my gut tells me there's something not accounted for. I focused on this in a seminar and I think the professor was partially persuaded.

But it doesn't matter because that's not where truth is. The truth, as Palmer would say, was in the interactions. I was willing to interact with this famous and very smart text, to have my own relationship with it instead of bowing to it. I noticed early on in reading it that a lot of the arguments, clever as they were, didn't match what the art looked like to me. So my interaction with the art, in itself, was not totally dependent on the text, and for Palmer it's important to have some sense of the thing in itself, of its own speech outside of interpretations.

I argued that many of the author's key images (not all, but I gave many examples from the article) did the opposite of what she claimed and I said why. I had another intuition that I pushed, and this is where my prof, Johnny Mac (due to her outspoken, unpredictable, entertaining ways) took more issue. I'm willing to hear that, but I wasn't persuaded by her. I had the sense she was so in love with a particular argument that she wasn't totally open to contradictions of it. But maybe I'm just annoyed she didn't agree with me. This ambiguity, how the professor and I respond to things in different ways together, is part of the relationship, and so that level of engagement, with our hearing of and confusions about one another, our arguments and stuck places, our willingness to look at an talk about, is, in my reading of Palmer, all truth.

One of the great things about what Palmer writes is that it's steeped in reality. When you're in a classroom, even if it's a lecture, especially when it's a seminar, you're in a position of relatedness. You're relating to the material -- what he calls the known, to the professor, to your peers who become your colleagues, and even to yourself as the knower. You get to know, by learning about, being able to talk about, the information, and you get to be known by others.

Palmer's idea of being known is interesting and it's one I've been puzzling over. Being known by other people seems straight-forward enough. A lot of learning happens in making yourself known and knowing others, allowing those things to emerge. The idea of emergence fits nicely, since Palmer talks about attentiveness, listening, allowing silence, making space. You're not alone; you're there to be known, too, and so you're supported in a mutual situation.

This is a helpful idea for me because what I sometimes struggle with in class, and struggled with more when I was younger, is that I'm supposed to always say incredibly smart things and be impressive in class or else I don't deserve to even be there. It gets me into worry around if I'm 'good enough.' This can inspire a lot of preparation, but more frustration and anxiety. I always end up feeling like I'm not good enough. You're never the smartest around; you can't 'win' and Palmer writes about the perils of having a competitive attitude instead of a cooperative one.

A competitive attitude is isolating because you're worried about if the professor 'likes you' and you're worried about how your comments compare to those of your peers. You're not setting yourself up for happiness, or even more maximal learning. It's not a realistic perspective because it doesn't give you a base from which to relate to other people, and yet there they are. You have this goal of proving how smart you are and other people could jeopardize this. Scary situation.

I feel ashamed of these things, and I have trouble not feeling competitive or down on myself when someone else seems 'really smart,' but I learned these things from a family system where you're supposed to be the most brilliant and that makes you worthwhile. My mom teaches, in a very different field from me, and she makes it clear that if a student isn't talented he or she isn't worth her time and should probably drop the subject altogether. For her, if a student has a lot of trouble with some aspect of learning, he can compensate for it through his other talents. This is all very scary and uncompromising and not realistic about the ups and downs of learning, as well as teaching.

Palmer's approach works very well because it allows me to relate productively and not competitively with others. I can learn from them, and they can learn from me, even the prof. This doesn't occur by me being the smartest person but just by being in relationship, in community, with them. Things form in this community for everyone; I'm responsible, or 'accountable' as he says, for my own faithful presence there, not for being endlessly clever, and this gives me a lot more flexibility and freedom in my learning. He likes to use somewhat archaic, religious language, but he does a good job of clarifying what he means. So when he talks about being "obedient to truth," I think he means being sincere and open to the learning relationships, offering your presence and inquiries and being willing to receive those of others. A willingness, a commitment to engage is being obedient to truth. I wouldn't usually use the term obedient myself, but it's okay, because I get it.

Where being known gets even more interesting, more subtle, is in relationship to inanimate things. For Palmer, this is a really important part of learning. Actually approaching material involves a dialectical relationship with the subject at hand; relationship is not exclusive to the classroom. I think it's important that Palmer extends his arguments here, to being known by material as you come to know it, because there's a big solitary aspect to learning, and Palmer doesn't shy away from that at all.

You could say, "community is all very well and good, but what about when I'm doing my reading, alone? coming up with arguments alone? writing essays alone? researching alone? what then?" I've had study groups that have disbanded because people wanted to focus more by themselves. I find that studying with others is more helpful if you're studied yourself first, and then you can bounce off people. So a lot of the nuts and bolts of learning needs to be solitary, and that's where it can be, in my experience, its most joyous and most frightening.

Palmer writes, "when we know something truly and well...we feel inwardly related to it; knowing it means that we have somehow entered into its life, and it into ours." This is something I experience in great moments. I can feel that connection to a subject, an interaction with it. I can feel getting into its world, and saying things that have personal relevance to me by talking about it. Interpreting is fascinating this way because the subject is deeply related to you just by virtue of your focusing on it, but it allows you to talk about something external to yourself. It is and isn't you. This is juicy.

I like his focus on relationship here, not only because it is accurate, but because it helps me correct another delusion I learned along the way. At some point I got the idea that "I" have to be smart enough for "it." "It" is masterful and "I" need to raise myself to that status by interpreting well. I think our culture makes it easy for us to fall into this approach. When you go to museums, for example, things are still quite traditional unfortunately, and they're very busy convincing you you're looking at masterworks. It's easy to feel small in comparison. I'm just some little shithole looking at amazing works by Insert Renaissance Master Here that have stood the test of time.

I've never been very persuaded by the myth of the great artist, so I love the stuff, of course by well-known authors, that criticizes it. But it can also be difficult for me to remind myself that these constructions aren't real, aren't primary, and they may exist, but so do many other things, and I don't have to take them as criticisms of me, or things I have to become. At heart, the subject, in a museum or not, is just another thing I'm relating to, and we are things that can affect one another. This gives me an increased openness to material. I can wonder, "how is this going to strike me today? what does it bring out in me and what do I see in it?" As Palmer writes: "our opening question should not be 'how logical is that thought?' but 'whose voice is behind it? what is the personal reality from which that thought emerged? how can I enter and respond to the relation of that thinker to the world?"

This allows me to be attentive and caring to all of my observations instead of worrying about which observations are 'smart' and which are 'hopelessly stupid.' I know this is silly, but there's something in me that wants to have an amazing interpretation of every artwork I come across. Just immediately. Like that. Because I am smart and awesome and cool. I cannot be the only graduate student to secretly want this. Who wouldn't? It would make life easier. And of course it doesn't happen. Because it can't. Because it's not reality. And not being in tune with, in relationship with reality is stressful because it's delusion, suffering.

So Palmer's approach reminds me to care about where truth is situated, in the relationship that is the encounter. There's nothing wrong with an encounter. It can involve silence, confusion, creativity, love, hate, boredom, anything. And it changes constantly. Palmer beautifully calls "the search for truth" "a continually uncertain journey." When I don't have to control the encounter by being the smartest, I can go more deeply into what comes. I can be more flexible yet more centered. Noticing the conditioning, my stress, can be part of the encounter. And I know from experience that this changes quite quickly. This often happens early on for me, but it's never the bulk of my relationship with a subject. The more I get into it, the more joy there is, and now I know that this is because I'm encountering it more fully instead of through punishing expectations. So now we have a nice fusion, because noticing the conditioning arising and passing away is a Buddhist technique, and being in relationship, knowing and being known by the subject, is Palmer's contribution.

The idea of a relationship with the "known," the pliability of the terms -- the knower is known and the known knows -- is also helpful because the effort is shared. I get quite a bit of worry around the ability to produce ideas. They need to come out, and what if they don't? What if I have nothing to say about this work, or enough ideas for the paper? I worry about sudden failure. This has never happened, but it's often felt like a real worry until, once again, it doesn't happen. With the idea of the encounter, the responsibility is shared. Of course the "known" object is not writing the paper for me. What I mean is that ideas get produced in the many encounters and relationships one has during the course of research, with the subject matter, with articles about it, with things by the artist, with my own flashes of inspiration and moments of unknowing, with my own writing process and its ups and downs. And on top of all that I can talk to colleagues and professors and learn from those encounters. Things are too layered and interesting and open for me to feel alone, that if I have no brilliant ideas I'll fall flat and die.  Palmer's ideas about being in a relationship with the known give me a lot more to work with and take some burden off me.

The only thing I would add is that Palmer also talks about the importance of emotions in learning. When we relate to things, our whole person is present and it is only obstructive to ignore that. I love this because I feel like it isn't a problem for me to have my different emotions, whereas I've often worried that emotions made me weak and would distract me from insights. I used to feel like the way to work was to get lost in it, and it can be okay if that happens, there are advantages to that, but I'm allowed, even encouraged, to feel grounded in my body and centered in my heart, to invest myself as a living being in my work and in the classroom. Ups and downs are part of it, and I really want to keep infusing my intellectual life with dhamma and bringing out the amazing wholesomeness of learning. I want to shape my own ideas and contribute intellectually and I want the community's help in doing that. This is all possible, and I don't need to be anything other than myself for it all to happen.

Art comes into being through engaged relationships, between the artist and his concerns, his relationship to others and to issues of his time, between the artist and whatever medium or mediums he chooses, between him and his unconscious, or, to be more Barthesian about this, relationships between texts and intertexts, assumptions and interweavings put into play by the scriptor. Art, criticism, theory, scholarship are born and developed through complex and multilayered relationships and it is through relationships, the truth of many kinds of community, that these things stay alive and take on new resonance.

(PS -- too tired to explain opening quote -- fuck off! :-) )