a stupid thoughtless Somewhat - Sunday 25 May 2008

not so desperate
sun on my shoulder
the park is pleasant
and well-kept.

brick path
boy with a basket of flowers,
flickering shadow of leaves
on a bench
on my book
tucked back behind town hall
in the midst of the crash of the week
an island.
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04:53:18 PM, Sunday 25 May 2008

Writing poetry is not a secret vice. Or so Tim tells me. _
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02:46:56 PM, Sunday 25 May 2008

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10:17:49 PM, Saturday 24 May 2008

So we saw something scurry across the bike trail on our way in to Cambridge. After some discussion we decided it was not likely a squirrel, or a cat. Then it scurried across again with something following it. We went to investigate the side of the trail where it went, and there it was, a mother groundhog with a big fluffy baby groundhog in its mouth. Ahead of us on the trail was a slight commotion. We continued, and saw this, being menaced by a large dog, and playing cute and fluffy, which is how I got this shot. Presumably its mother picked it up once the dog left. _
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09:42:23 PM, Saturday 24 May 2008

To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them stage-coaches will have become romances--a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they went--ah, how their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage's end they demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more. Whither, however, is the light four-inside Trafalgar coach carrying us? Let us be set down at Queen's Crawley without further divagation, and see how Miss Rebecca Sharp speeds there.

From Vanity Fair, which is (so far) much more fun than I'd expected (I somehow had it in my head as dreary, which is why I hadn't got round to it before). _
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10:09:20 PM, Thursday 22 May 2008

I need more ocean. I need, like a whole year of ocean. Sort of, I was looking for what I wanted in life, and then I saw a sunset over Cape Cod Bay, and something sort of went click, that's it. And now I'm left with, well, ok, how do I translate that into anything? What should I do with my life? Ocean. Sunset. Hm.

The Beston book is great by the way, my boss recommended it to me, and I recommend it to you.

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09:05:01 PM, Thursday 22 May 2008

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01:51:07 PM, Saturday 17 May 2008

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01:50:55 PM, Saturday 17 May 2008

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01:50:39 PM, Saturday 17 May 2008

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01:49:41 PM, Saturday 17 May 2008

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08:37:50 PM, Friday 9 May 2008

I wrote the following last fall and winter, in preparation for giving my credo, a tradition at my church, where we share what we believe. I was feeling kind of upset and it helped me to read it again just now.

1. Meta

How is spirituality defined as separate from everyday life? What is this particular thread, the spiritual, the philosophical, God, in my life, as opposed to my life in general? I mean I seem to have a deep vein of this sort of thing, it fascinates me. But when it comes down to it my idea of God is a near-mathematical abstraction, philosophy is a source of frustration, and I dislike the very word spirituality. So there is the negative energy, the frustration I have in this domain. And there is this difference between honesty and sincerity: I find it easy to say something sincere, but it is difficult to say anything truly honest. Sincere is how I discovered Lao Tzu as a kid and thought he was cool. Honest would be how I have struggled with those ideas over the years, and that is harder to think, harder to say, harder to tell as a story.

It's not about what do I like. It's about what's absolutely vitally important. Or, about the edge between what's important, and what we can't know, or what seems to be important, but is unknown. That is to say, what isn't important at all, in a certain sense. What one can get by without thinking about. What is perhaps better to get by without thinking about. Is it all about death? What things are like after death? But that seems trivial. Not that I know, but it seems unimportant. There must be some larger scheme of things. It's not so linear, not so much about the future, also not so personal, not so much about me, or even about human beings. Whatever it is, they don’t hide it in universities, they don’t hide it in the himalayas, they don’t hide it behind altars or between rows upon rows of numbers. I know that much, but I haven’t quite properly found it, not yet.

2. Grace

There's this thing I call grace. It happens every once in a while, I'm just walking along, or waking up from a nap, and suddenly I get this feeling. I often have a physical chill, and at the same time this feeling of immense safety. It's as if there's this stillness at the center of things, and it's always there, and for a moment I am resting on it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the Christian concept of grace, I don't know much about that. But that's, when I think about the spiritual, the first thing that comes to mind.

3. Growing Up

I don't associate church much with the spiritual. Going to the Presbyterian church as a child gave me a grounding in Christian stories, and taught me the Lord's prayer. I learned another set of stories at home, stories of dinosaurs and black holes; if anything, the dinosaurs and black holes were more moving. I remember asking my parents on the way home from church once, in all innocence, why they don't talk about evolution in church. They just laughed.

There was one ceremony, the Boar's Head, that meant something to me. It was a cross between a pagan ritual and a Christmas pageant, and I often participated as a member of the children's chorus. Certain songs from that, like the Holly and the Ivy, and Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, stick with me. The latter was sung from the balcony, starting with a single soprano and gradually building up until it included the organ and the whole choir.

But I think as a child I didn't find much that stirred my soul in Christianity. My soul was stirred more by caterpillars and crayfish, metal springs and sandboxes. So that when, later, I decided to turn away from Christianity, there was no great struggle or significance. Despite Sunday school, I was more or less raised atheist.

5. Tired

Right now I am so tired. Spiritually, morally, so tired. I am biding my time, gaining strength, or hoping to. Resting on this thing, which for the moment I call God, though I am not completely comfortable with that name. Clutching it.

I want, I want, I want. I want something I cannot define. Something perfectly definite, something quite particular.

Everything is always here, we take different angles on it, is all. Sometimes I like the more obscure angles, rubber bouncy balls down stormdrains, I don't know, stories I heard once, it's all locked up now.

I do not have an exact mind. It is agile, it can be delicate, but it is not exact. I don't remember the details of stories; I don't remember things, arbitrary things, numbers, names. I can deal readily in abstraction, I can sometimes compact the complex into something usefully simple. I sometimes flow a little, but it's like ice shifting, not like a stream. I feel stupid, I feel stuffed up, I feel foolish and wooden.

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Another try. Every time I do this—it’s funny, the other bits of my journal, where I’m not trying explicitly to talk about spirituality, are much more spiritual. Why? I get self conscious. I put myself on platforms. I’m not really strong enough yet to do this. Ego gets in the way. Still I have to try.

Today in the park, how do I put it? Do I say “I saw a seagull flying over a pond, had chills?” Will that convey anything at all? But best to keep it simple.

Well what was I really thinking about. I was thinking, it wasn’t just experience. What were the thoughts? I thought of what Suzuki said about how a knock on wood could remind one of Home. And I looked at the pond, and there it was. Rumi says that beauty is always there, it’s just most of the time you have to be walking in a garden to see it. So I was walking in a park, and it was beautiful. That’s all.

I don’t think the chills are... the essence of spiritual. They are physical, a sign of physical joy. Relief, release.

I have been drinking too much from the deep wells. I see that, my head all full of Rumi and Suzuki. I could use some stupidity. I could use some dirty snow. Not to drink, mind you. I walk past it and note its odd formations, its ugliness. The more I notice it the less ugly it seems. Innocent, anyhow. I could use someone throwing snowballs at me. I could use, something, anyway. The drink me and you’ll get smaller potion.

Statement: it is insane to buy Rumi or Zen Mind calendars (both available at Whole Foods). Please defend: I don’t want to hang on these words. I don’t want to define myself by these words. I don’t want to pretend to see using someone else’s eyes. I just want to see. It doesn’t matter, I have nothing against these calendars, certainly there are worse things, but for me right now it would be profoundly wrong to buy one.

What is the deep game I am playing? Where is it? It’s not, it’s not even about what I do. It’s not even about who I am, or who I am becoming. I mean, it is about that, but also it’s not. It’s not about trying to grip or grasp something. Or, it’s about gripping and grasping something, and needing to let go.

Lots of threads, lots of threads. Spirituality. My illness, my illness. My silly ambition. Philosophy. Cognitive science. My illness again. And am I not going to say anything about love? (now love is even harder to talk about than spirituality). Music, philosophy, science, music again, poetry. Grand mystic visions, oh god yes, had those. Spat them out, am spitting them out. And yet respecting them. I don’t want more of them, but I want more of what they meant, does that make sense?

I need more grit. I’m like a cat that needs to chew on a fern. In order to be sick.

I am very demanding. I will not take a God of Forms who breathes perfection, of which this world is only lame imitation. This world is imitation nothing. This world is the real thing. I will not take a God who does not have a full and complete understanding of oreo cookies and stupid facebook apps and the way snow piles up with dirt when it’s been plowed.

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10:02:05 PM, Wednesday 7 May 2008

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09:13:03 PM, Tuesday 6 May 2008

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09:12:50 PM, Tuesday 6 May 2008

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Wonderful premise, to travel the world looking for the happiest places. There should be more books like this, fun non-stressful non-fiction.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton

This is a book I was very sad to return to the library. Exploration of Zen through the eyes of a Trappist monk. The dialogue between the author and D.T. Suzuki was very interesting. Also the chapter on transcendence. I liked a koan about a monk who had been told that everything was in his mind. The monk goes to a master and asks “How can I fit mountains in my mind?” The master replies “Indeed, how can you fit mountains in your mind?” Reading this book I found myself refreshed, but I find I can't grasp onto anything in it, it left my mind strangely empty.

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04:47:58 PM, Sunday 4 May 2008

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03:59:30 PM, Saturday 3 May 2008

Speaking of technological advances, I have recently acquired a kindle. Not the sort of thing I would have bought for myself, but it holds a strange fascination nevertheless. The e-book is one of those inevitable advances that seems to be arriving only in fits and starts, and I guess this is one of the bigger fits.

I mean, we're all very used to text being flung around the world and arriving on screens, but it still feels a bit magic when you can then curl up with the screen and read it for hours. The electronic ink thing is nifty, and necessary I think for the whole concept to work.

A few years ago I had a conversation with an uncle about the electronic future of books. He insisted that a regular book, due to its physical interface, holds information that an electronic book won't. There is some truth to this. It's much harder to tell where you are in a book, despite the little dots at the bottom of the screen which fill in as you turn pages, though it is nice to be able to change the text size. It's also alarmingly easy to accidentally turn a page, or several at a time. And real books never randomly sit there and refuse to let you turn the page.

The most appealing thing about the concept of electronic books, for me at least, is the possibility of replacing shelves and shelves of books with a small electronic device. So how does the kindle do on this score? Well, it has plenty of space for books, apparently 200 books if you don't buy the extension card, and a gazillion more if you do. But I'm not sure if I would like to have a whole collection of books on the thing. I tend to form piles of books. This one is books I'm reading, this one books I haven't got around to yet, this one books I've sniffed and put down, these are to be sorted into the permanent collection later, which is arranged into philosophy, history, fiction, etc. The kindle lets you sort your books three ways: by title, by author, and by most recently viewed. Not remotely adequate for a collection of hundreds of books. And of course most books are not available on it (and they have the gall to charge for project gutenberg books! but you can get those for free, it just takes a bit more work). But ah well. The point is, the future is on its way. _
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03:48:03 PM, Saturday 3 May 2008

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08:18:39 PM, Friday 2 May 2008

7-zip. Progress continues to be made even in something as simple as text compression. If you are going to zip something, use this program and not winzip. You can even make a self-extracting file so your users don't need to download anything. I had to zip 5000 html files the other day and it was a fifth the size of the winzipped version.

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05:59:01 PM, Friday 2 May 2008

Dream: bicycle part sushi, just like California rolls except with bits of bicycles where the crab and avocado should be. Also, John Mayer vanilla tea, which told you the stories of 30 mothers in song as you drank it (because tea packages aren't evil enough). _
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01:17:10 PM, Tuesday 29 April 2008

It's raining. I am damp at the ankles. Feeling sick from the Austrian thing. Don't like being so affected by the news. Someone remind me that human nature is not evil.

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11:50:19 AM, Tuesday 29 April 2008

Map of world happiness _
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11:01:52 AM, Saturday 19 April 2008

On the way to work, a small tree just in leaf was casting a precise shadow on a concrete wall. I neglected to take a picture.

On my way home I saw a cyclist sniffing flowers. He turned and asked if they were magnolias. I confessed my ignorance on the matter. He was glad at least, he said, that he wasn’t the only one ignorant of flowers.

I bring the outside in with me, it’s still spring in here, the leaves are still opening out out there, and it smells right.

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08:53:31 PM, Thursday 17 April 2008

I was thinking the other day as I was walking down the aisle at a CVS, maybe it was the magazines or the beauty products, I don't know, but anyway I was thinking, people are fools to marry for anything but love, but you have to be very careful how you define love.

This article is tragic. It's like love doesn't even exist, men are just these bundles of attributes. I imagine a Frankenstein Mr. Right, all these attributes sewn together and stamped "soul mate". It's like, ok, yes, in a sense, people are bundles of attributes. Short, tall, skinny, fat, witty, dull, we've all got attributes, and more than that we're made in other people's eyes of images, actions. But when you love someone, you just see them, that person, not attributes. It's not some magic or something I think would be useful to force oneself to do. But I also don't think "settling" is a useful thing for this person to do, or to advise. "Settling" implies that the person you are marrying is not good enough, but you'll take them because they're all that's left in the barrel. There is rampant egotism in the very word. It's somehow, settling for oneself, for one's place in the world, that is the important thing. But I don't know, God knows I've had my problems with egotism, it's just that article was so sad to me, in a way its author didn't seem to understand.

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10:06:02 PM, Wednesday 16 April 2008

Equal Logic

In which confusion is caught in the making.

(3/27/2008)

If all is here, then what do I lack? If God is here then what do I seek? If eternity is now, then why does it seem distant?

If I say the world flows according to the will of God, does this help me? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes such phrases knock me into truth, sometimes not. It's not a matter of getting the phrase right, it's a matter of reminding oneself of-- what? Of whatever-it-is. And I don't know why one is sometimes in right relation to whatever-it-is and sometimes not. Where the error is. If I look at the words I use, take them seriously, eternally present, whatever it is, it seems there should be no reason for things to go wrong, no room for error.

And yet it makes no sense whatsoever to posit something ever-present. My own darkness and confusion, my own inability to fully comprehend the experience of others, seems to preclude the existence of something that could know all-- for to know all surely includes knowing me, and fully understanding me means experiencing my limitations, and therefore not knowing all. But there is an equal logic (though I find it harder to express) that says all experience must be tied together at some root, since every known experience bears some relation to every other experience-- connect the dots and find the shape.

I'm not ready for one of my logics to win. Suspecting they are both wrong, or both needing more light.

(4/6/2008)

In a certain sense it doesn’t matter if someone has the wrong understanding, if they take the right action.

How can there be both limitation and wholeness?

And why should it bother you that things are as they are? These are observable facts.

But what are the facts, and by what do I observe them?

The fact that things are limited and separate, that I am limited and separate, is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning.

Then there is a trivial sense of unity of the world: one can stamp the word “world” on it, one can see the parts united as one sees the different parts of a painting united by being on one canvas. Then the question: is there some more substantial unity, is there something corresponding to the canvas? Does the canvas have some substantial reality (is there an ether?) At first glance it seems yes, there are the laws of physics, all these regularities that seem to indicate that this is not a purely arbitrary world. Then again, and have patience with me...

All moments that make up my current real world are, to the extent that they affect me at all, present in this moment. Therefore I cannot take this moment out of its context and say, what if there were today but 1990 had never happened? Although the past is dark to me, and the future darker still (here is limitation again), all of that, including the limitation, is bound up in this moment.

Even if there were no theoretical reason why someone couldn’t have an isolated experience, why this moment couldn’t have been created without plodding through the years before it, still all that would be part of this, the dinosaur bones, the scars planted. So the simplest explanation is that there is one creation that includes every moment, and every moment is directly present in every other moment...

And here I’ve drifted, arguably into gobbeldy-gook, because insofar as moments are separable, are limited things, it is not true that every one is directly present in every other, any more than one color is present in another color in a painting. Something I’ve forgotten entirely is not present to me now. And having caught confusion in the making, I think I’ll stop.

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12:24:19 PM, Sunday 6 April 2008

Acceptance

(3/10/2008)

I was talking to my therapist about acceptance today.

I feel suddenly quite sad.

(3/11/2008)

Of course it is possible not to accept things. Sometimes it is even impossible to accept things. It doesn't matter. Things are as they are. Will be implacably, what they are despite any amount of storming, despite all resolutions of calm acceptance.

If this is so then why not accept? Then again, why accept? And thirdly, one cannot even fully control that, one's own acceptance or non-acceptance. "Things are, and you must accept them": I would scratch out the second half of that sentence. Accepting things is not a moral obligation, nor an order from an unkind God. By your very existence you accept things as they are. Although you reject the world with the inmost fiber of your being, still you accept it by the fact of your being. Which does not make acceptance any easier.

As I was walking by Fresh Pond today, among my other thoughts this one kept popping up: "I want". I want what? A cup of tea, a cookie, self-justification? But I do want. Then again I don't. I am almost, very nearly content. Or, I have moments where I think "this is it" just before I plunge back into sadness or irritation. I am so tired of bobbing and bobbing on the endless sea of experience. Sickened by the grotesque multiplicity of the past, fearing the same, worse, in the future. Caught like a butterfly on a pin in this moment. And at the same time, I'm fine, safe, at home. What I want is an assurance, a security (a stock, a bond). And this is precisely what I can't have.

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08:54:48 PM, Sunday 23 March 2008

Mistakes

(3/12/2008)

Five projects at work today. Absolutely exhausted. Needing resources. Came home and Tim fed me pizza in bed.

This is the time when I need my consolations. I didn't quite have the flexibility of soul, the self-protectiveness that I need, today. But I made it through, somehow.

Each moment it is very important to get things right. And very, very important to keep one's temper when things go wrong. Even when other people don't. Most mistakes are of emotion, not of logic.

The world is this great big shell or metalwork-- some intricate craft which is vital, which is being worked, only in one point. For you, that point is now. Where is "now"? Where is it melting, where is it vital? And know that however you work it, it stays. And know that it is hand crafted and full of awful mistakes already. And know that it is still beautiful, and that what you do still matters immensely.

I would like to believe this, that it matters what I do. I don't want it to matter too much, but if it matters, that keeps me on my toes. I mean this is sort of the core of my question, or at least it is one of my questions: does it matter what I do? And if so in what sense?

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08:35:14 PM, Sunday 23 March 2008

(from my handwritten journal)

Where am I? (3/8/2008)

I was on the verge of sleep just now, wonderful soft black space, wondering "where am I?"

Where am I, who am I , where have I come from, where am I going? Sometimes it seems there is something wrong with asking questions like these. One is too old, too young, not expert enough, or simply that the questions are tired, having been asked too many times in the past, the answers either too obvious or too impossible to contemplate.

Just, on the edge of sleep like that, after a satisfying day of ocean and spring cleaning, the question seems significant. As if I'm coming from somewhere, all the way back, I'm going somewhere, all the way forward, and this place should be familiar to me. But somehow I find this concept surprising.

The only eternity is the eternally present. I believe this. But belief is not understanding. Of course I don't understand much in the grand scheme of things, and maybe I am not meant to.

One can get lost in space and time. It looks as if they stretch out forever in each direction. One can feel trapped. But I think that place of source and return is closer than one thinks. One must reimagine, reenvision space and time. Somehow. The source is neither a specific location in it, nor is it outside it.

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08:23:28 PM, Sunday 23 March 2008

In case you were wondering where the phrase "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" comes from (I was), it's Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century anchoress. I find the concept of anchorites horrifying (not a vocation for the claustrophobic), but I like the phrase. Voice in the Wilderness is where I came across a mention of her, and Little Gidding being where I noticed the phrase.

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09:23:55 AM, Saturday 22 March 2008

I'm leading a discussion group on this article tomorrow (yay free Atlantic archives!). I thought I would try to gather my thoughts here first.

Opening questions:
What is essential to religion?
Why does Whitehead condemn rules of conduct as essential to religion, saying "Every great religious teacher has revolted against the presentation of religion as a mere sanction of rules of conduct."?
What does the spirit of rational inquiry demand of us?
How are we to tell the difference between groping in the dark for ways to communicate our experiences, and giving in to brute superstition?

Some thoughts:

I often hear it said that what religions have in common (when taken in their best possible lights) is that they all tell you to be good and love your neighbor. While it is certainly true that one should be good, one should love one's neighbor, and while it is also true that these are not trivial, but powerful and difficult things, still there is something unispiring about this formulation. Therefore I approve of Whitehead's rejection of rules of conduct or the creation of a more comfortable society as the essential role of religion. But what else is there? Here we come to the real brick wall between science and religion, which is that science will not recognize anything that cannot at some level be seen or said, while religion is concerned with just those things that can't be seen or even directly said, but are nevertheless part of our common experience. And we do need to talk about those things, religious discourse is useful, is... you must realize, I am a UU agnostic who never goes to church, so what do I know? I just seem to keep picking up books by Catholic theologians and Zen monks, and finding there, in the religion section, something I really don't find to any degree elsewhere-- and that's not even what I mean, not at all, really.

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10:32:45 PM, Wednesday 19 March 2008

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01:45:44 PM, Sunday 9 March 2008

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10:24:54 PM, Friday 7 March 2008

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10:11:23 PM, Friday 7 March 2008

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10:11:11 PM, Friday 7 March 2008

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02:07:07 PM, Sunday 2 March 2008

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