Meditation Camp Part II

How strange the body.
How strange the throat. Like a drain where all the emotions get caught.
How strange the master.
How strange the mark.
How strange the names we give our lives.

I met the master on the first day of camp. Indeed! It was not Goenkaji, though he was our master, our teacher, no doubt about that. In fact, it had been sort of strange to slowly understand and get used to the set up. There were two teachers there, physically present, sitting crosslegged on the dais in front of the meditation hall, facing the students, silent and still as statues. Their main function was “occupying space” as one of my friends who’d been there before put it. I had thought that a weird thing to say, but it turns out it was true. Well, almost true. Their main function was occupying space and acting as a “finglonger” or button pusher for Goenkaji, for every teaching was recorded on video and every meditation was recorded on cd. So the teachers would come in, and the man (they were a couple) would push the button and then we’d all settle into our seats, some of us (if you were like me) making last minute adjustments in the hopes that this stance would not be too painful to last the whole hour.

Of course, once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Because what I’m talking about it aditthan, or “strong determination” which starts on the 4th day and translates into passing 3 of the roughly 11 hours you spend meditating to be spent in complete stillness. So even if you have a throbbing pain, a cramp or an “intensified, gross sunsation” as Goenkaji puts it, you need to stay still and observe.

The aditthan sittings were, as you might imagine, the hardest part of the course, but also the most instructive. That is why I get ahead of myself. But first, let me tell you about the master.

So the first three days are spent learning anapana, which is an exercise to calm and still the brain. Basically you observe your breath. You observe the sensation inside your nostrils, on the edges of your nostrils, throughout the entire triangular area of your nose and upper lip. You observe the breath coming in, and the breath coming out-- the small wind it makes, whether it’s hot or cold, left nostril or right nostril, etc. You also observe any other sunsation that happens on this area of your face-- for instance, an itch. The whole point of the exercise is to concentrate the mind on these sunsations and TO NOT REACT to them. That’s key. You got to just observe. Don’t react.

By the way, the reason I call them sunsations is sort of an in-joke I had with myself the whole time. That’s how Goenkaji says sensations with his Indian/Burmese accent, and once I got to thinking of them as sunsations I couldn’t help but be transported into some bizarre TV commercial where a soft drink or shampoo was being peddled to me-- or even like a new brand of skittles.

Anyway, so the first day you wake up at 4 (as you will on all the following days) and promptly go back to sleep. Then you wake up at 4:20 again, with the sound of bells ringing next to your cabin, make a murky pot joke to yourself, thrown on your sweater, gloves, hat, scarf, grab your flashlight and make your way out to the meditation hall under a starlit sky. I remember this feeling from the one night I spent at Thich Nhat Han’s Plum Village Monastery in France. It’s great. Really, I really love being under the night sky, walking towards a warm space to meditate. I love the literal enlightenment that happens as you sit in that space for however many hours. At Plum Village the stained glass windows of the meditation hall were lit faintly but consistently by the time we opened our eyes for meditation, and before breakfast. Here, at North Fork, the sky never got quite bright, but we could see the stars mostly erased and a coat of light visible at the line of the mountains around us.

So you start your meditation at 4:30. Some folks chose to sleep in until breakfast, or meditate in their rooms. I wasn’t sure if this was optional, or if I should get on my high horse about their cheating ways, but what I did know is that this is the one part of the day that I wouldn’t miss.

Especially *also* since it made breakfast so much more fun. Attractive. Whatever words you may apply to one of two meals served at 6:30 in a place where the rest of the hours are spent enduring excruciating pain.

Haha, of course I exaggerate for effect.

... or do I?

I actually don’t remember the first day being too hard. The schedule itself never changed-- 4:30-6:30 meditation, 8-9 group meditation, 9-11 meditation in the hall or in your dorms, 11-12 breakfast, 12-1 rest, 1-2:30 meditate in hall or in your room, 2:30-3:30 group meditataion, 3:30-5 meditation in the hall or in your room, 5-6 teatime!, 6-7, group meditation, 7-8:30 MOVIETIME! (actually it’s a video of Goenkaji giving a Dharma talk but he’s quite charming and funny and it feels so good to do something other than meditate, and it feels so nice to have some human contact that I felt each day around 7 that I was about to go to a summer blockbuster). 8:30-9 more meditation, and 9-10 rest & lights out.

So, as you can see, pretty much dry toast the length of the day. Of course, I found ways to spice it up with my jokes and pithy observations but I’m not quite sure that was the point...

... And STILL I haven’t told you about meeting the master. But now I’m really ready.

The first day wasn’t that hard, though it sure was repetitive. But one thing that started happening is-- I started seeing faces during my meditation. This is a very odd thing for me, because I don’t usually get any kind of visuals while meditating. And, though I’ve only been doing Buddhist meditation practice for the past few months, I’ve been meditating in Savasana, post-yoga for the last 7 years. Even guided meditations, with their visualizations and stuff, are sort of hard for me. I can’t quite disengage my brain which asks-- well, am I going down these steps too fast-- should the walls be this color, am I controlling this too much? even while the teacher is telling us how to descend into our unconscious realms.

So it was quite a surprise when I saw my first face. And it was quite a face. In fact, it was a head. It was the severed, bloody head that Kali holds in one of her hands. Then, later on in the day, I saw some sort of (I want to say, in a bizarrely midwestern fashion) ethnic face. I think it might have been a mask, like an African mask or a Hittite statue or something. Then, I’m quite sure I had a brief flash of an Asian face. Now I’m the first to suspect myself of creating these visions (especially since there’s such a clearly discernible pattern here) but I know I didn’t consciously think them up. So, it’s actually the pattern that’s suspect, that I might have superimposed on the actual experience as one imposes order and consistency on to a dream when trying to remember or retell it.

And the next face was certainly not of my conjuring. Toward the later part of the day I was sitting on my cushion, trying dilligently to follow my breath, when all of a sudden I found myself looking into a huge eye. No, that’s not quite correct. I found myself being looked AT by a huge eye. Seeing the eye was startling enough, but to sense that it was actually looking back at me was, in a word, uncanny. I shivered and got goosebumps, and in the split second before that this is what happened: The eye looked at me, I got WAY scared but then almost immediately I decided to look BACK at it (this is my dream-training of many years-- don’t run away from what’s scary) and then, I can almost swear to you with a clear conscience that the eye crinkled with amusement.

Then I got the goosebumps.

It was such a singularly strange experience, so vivid and so bizarre, that I can’t help but think this was the eye of the master. There was someone, something, there. Might have been a different side of myself. Dunno. But since vipassana is open to the idea of other “beings” than the ones we know (there are like 9 worlds, it’s very complicated and I don’t get it, I mean, I don’t get if it’s supposed to be literal but since at the end of practice you wish for the happiness of “all beings” I suspect there is some belief in other beings than the ones we know about or can see. And of course, it makes total sense to me, instinctually, that there should be all kinds of beings out there that we don’t know). In fact, I’m most tempted to view my experience as something akin to an ant or a snail or something coming face to face with a little boy or girl. What does the ant understand of the experience?

Meditation Camp Part I

My student told me to go. And I was ready for a teacher.
It was located in the Sierra Foothills. A modest cluster of cabins where the students lodge, and three central buildings: the men’s dining hall, the women’s dining hall, and the meditation hall, which I eventually came to think of as the spaceship.

The method is called Vipassana. It’s a form of meditation (the word means insight) that the Buddha Gautama is supposed to have himself practiced. Vipassana is practiced more in South East Asia, in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. The teacher of this course is named S.N. Goenka and he hails from Burma.

We were there to learn vipassana but you do not plunge straight into Vipassana. No. There are a lot of steps you need to go through. First, you get settled into your routine at the camp. The program lasts 10 days and is conducted in Noble Silence which means no speaking at all and no touching anyone and no looking in their eyes either. No gesticulations, no communication. The purpose of all these prohibitions is to make you get as close as you can to a Solitary retreat.

Of course, in practice, this is not so. You still stand in line with people for breakfast and lunch, you still recognize their shoes on the wooden racks outside the meditation hall, you still assign them names and life stories and generally manage to have relationships with them. Or, at least, I did. I had a crush on about 3 girls at any given time, one small feud that happened midway through, and numerous in-jokes about everyone else. Yes, my friends, the active, monkey, outward mind will glom on to whatever miniscule amount of information it has and squeeze the most out of it.

Actually, I was just talking about this with Heather. She was saying we’re social creatures and it’s normal for us to want to be with other people and therefore, to be outwardly inclined. I agree. And this is one thing I have trouble with-- reconciling Buddhism’s teachings with a non-monastic lifestyle. I know I’m not alone in this; Danielle has told me she has similar concerns, and my pops, some years ago, when I declared that I was thinking about becoming a nun said, very thoughtfully, while taking a spoonful of flan at the Divan Patisserie in Istanbul’s Baghdad Avenue: Yalnizlik Allah’a mahsustur. Which translates into: Solitude is God’s alone. He seemed to be repeating something he had learned, maybe long ago, but the fact that he said it so simply, without looking at me or trying to convince me in any way, made more of an impression on me than anything else.

Anyhows, so the camp is meant to create a monastic atmosphere, in fact, more of a hermetic atmosphere. Monastic it is, no matter the silence. The first night you get there you vow to take the 5 precepts which are simple enough: no killing, no stealing, no lying (easy when you don’t talk!), no sexual misconduct (easy when you don’t have sex!) and no intoxicants. This, Goenkaji explains to us over the video, is what’s called sila in Pali (an ancient and dead language that the Buddha spoke that we use in our lessons). It means morality. Any solid practice of vipassana needs to be based on flawless sila. So a monastic lifestyle makes this easy for the practitioners and, in fact, the vows are called “taking refuge” in the five precepts. So, like an umbrella, or a tent, you take shelter in perfect morality, at least in the action-sense. Your thoughts could still be awful and terrible, but at least you’re not acting them out.

I really like this taking refuge business, I must say. I just love that it’s an idea, so that means it’s always available. Maybe this is the essence of any religious longing-- the need for a constant refuge. Unlike a person or any circumstance or anything outside of you, the idea is always there. God is always there. Something-- something is always there. Always ready. Whatever happens you can take refuge in there, in this ever present place (of course, even then, it’s hard to put into practice. Just because something or someone is always available doesn’t mean you’re always willing to go to it, even though you might be in dire need). But anyway, I like that the phrase "taking refuge" physicalizes this very vague but strong psychic urge.

So we took our refuge on our first night, after a brief dinner and an "orientation" which seemed like just announcements and logistics. This made me terribly impatient. I wanted to know what we were going to do, I wanted to get started on my task. After orientation we had a little break and then met up outside the meditation hall-- the girls on one side of the building, the boys on the other. We were waiting to be called in and shown to our assigned spots. At first everyone was chatting and then we all quieted down. I'll never forget that feeling of standing around among the madrone trees, bundled up in the Sierra chill, with the stars fresh above us, waiting to be admitted into this building, this mysterious practice. Friends who had come together were saying goodbye to each other and hugging. It was so strange and so exciting. And once someone's name was called they would take their shoes off and just disappear inside. I took a deep breath of air, itching to find out for myself what was inside.

Boys don't cry

Just saw Boys Don't Cry for the first time. I'd been avoiding it for a long time since the only thing anyone seemed to say about it was that it was "really good" and "really heavy/depressing/sad". So I thought, I'd wait til the right time. Well, apparently it was tonight, after my free Chan (that's the Chinese version of Zen) meditation class at the monastery down the block. See, in Berkeley you can say things like that: "I'm just gonna run to the monastery, I'll be right back." In Oakland it's the liquor store. Anyway Heather, my roomie, has HBO and it was 10 o'clock and I'd been just yesterday asking my coworker Steve if he could recommend any really good movies and when he started listing comedies I even said "it doesn't have to be funny, it just has to be really good."

So it was the right time.

Especially considering my whole circle of friends is almost all dykes here.

What I'm surprised at is how much the movie is about class. No one ever really talks about that. Well, maybe if they ever get beyond the "really depressing" part of the commentary, but I never thought to ask because I thought the depressing thing was that this cross-dressing woman got killed because of her ways. I didn't know how much it was just as much because she was in a really poor and depressed community out in Nebraska.

The movie makes me scared of & hateful of men in general, but more it makes me scared of poverty and ignorance. It even made me reconsider my partying ways and romanticization of poverty/white trash culture. Not that I know much about it. What I do know is that I made many friends out here in Oakland who come from a white trash background, who pump their chests and brag/joke about it when I hang out with them. But these are all people who have gotten out, who have educated themselves, who were eager to leave that environment. I am so sheltered, it's really easy for me to misunderstand the reality and the complexity of such a background. Of course there are people in there who love, people who hurt, people who have just as much capacity and potential as people from different backgrounds. The difference seems to be that they have so much more baggage, so much more drama, so much more volatility in their lives. This, of course, I base all on a movie.

* * *

This morning, Jack, the son of my neighbors from upstairs, was waiting to leave for school. He's 7 and he's adopted. His biological mother is in prison and his father's whereabouts is unknown. It was a gorgeous sunny Berkeley morning, and he was waiting for Heather to take him to school on Walk & Roll day, where kids only bike or walk to school. Heather was trying to fix the chin strap for her helmet and Jack and I were standing on the porch. "Did you ever touch this?" he asked, pointing to the potted cactus that stands on a little table on the porch. Underneath it is an ashtray filled with my cigarette butts. First I thought he meant the butts, then I realized he meant the cactus. No, I said, I know what they feel like.

* * *

The movie made me crave a cigarette the whole time I was watching. The actors must have smoked a pack each. You know how it is with watching people smoke-- even if you don't smoke it makes you feel like having one. But, as I said, the movie also made me disgusted with that lifestyle, the easy rapport of beer and cigarettes and pot around the clock. So I thought about abstaining, but when I started writing this blog I stepped outside for a pall mall nonetheless. When I got done I put it out in the little ashtray. Just as I was stashing the ashtray under the little table, I leaned with my other hand, the one with which I was holding the laptop and my cup of water, against the cactus by mistake. It was not heavily enough to make me cry out or drop the computer or anything. But I felt the sting of the thorns. Just for a moment, I felt the sting.

Demagoguery and the Debate

It's hard to believe the way the Iraq issue is being handled in the presidential race. I just watched the debate and it seems McCain's strategy was to equate any mention of withdrawal with "defeat", thereby appealing to the competitiveness of his audience, to Americans' obsession with being a "winner" or a "loser." "What a game American politics is" says Heather, remote in hand, switching from CBS to MSNBC, sitting literally on the edge of her seat, putting her spectacles on and off. But is politics really a game?

And if it is, and if war is a game, then the U.S. can at least ADMIT that it's in Iraq not because of oil, or WMD or any goddamn democratic idealism but simply out of Ego. Whenever people now say "Oh, but we can't leave Iraq now," I just want to say (and only tonight did I really realize how angry it made me): What the Fuck Do You Care about Iraq? If the U.S. government or U.S. citizens cared anything about Iraq they would have withdrawn as soon as possible. Or would do it, as soon as possible. So I don't buy this self-deluding bullshit about let's stay in Iraq to make sure it's okay.

And, I think, neither does anyone else. Because, as the main spokesperson and supporter of the war, McCain and the Republican rhetoric focuses exclusively on the undesirability and Nonexistence of "defeat" in Iraq. In this way the similarities with Vietnam are frightening. You can't acknowledge the fact of defeat, you can't utter these words, even though it is an actual factual reality because it strikes too lethal a blow to American self-delusion, to Americans' egos, because it gets too close to the archetypal American personality's Neurosis.

So tonight I saw how obviously and repugnantly American idealism was coupled with American competitiveness to lull this nation into staying in Iraq. A friend of mine who works at an arts institution said, of her efforts to shmooze rich folks for contributions "I'm really good at serving them their own shit on a plate." Buon Appetito, America.

David Foster Wallace is dead

He killed himself on Friday. I can't believe it people. I can't believe it. I can't believe it I can't believe it. He was such a good writer. So brilliant and sensitive, so gifted in both mathematics and language, all these sos and sos. S.O.S. S.O.S. It brings up all kinds of thoughts-- was this inevitable? Is there anything that could have helped him, including himself? I mean, someone like that, you would think there is nothing you can tell him that he doesn't know. And not just cleverness-wise, but also in terms of insight. Check out the commencement speech he gave at Kenyon college a few years ago. There is so much there, so much knowledge of being human, of what is necessary to be human, both hard-earned and natural insight.

He was a great writer and a respected professor. He had every resource available to him. I know he'd been under medication for a long time and his depression was getting more and more severe. I read a quote from his parents that said he just couldn't stand it anymore. It sounded almost sympathetic, and that clues us into the extent of the misery he must have been experiencing. But god. It just makes me so sad. No one is infallible. Depression is truly a disease. Or is it? I mean, didn't he try everything? He must have tried other things like buddhism or yoga or the non-academic sciences of the soul. He must have, right? Someone so intelligent could not have failed to look into these other ways. So how is it that nothing helped? I don't know i don't know. It definitely makes me think the old-school thought of depression as something that can be overcome by sheer will or something is bullshit. I don't know if DFW was manic-depressive. Probably.

Oh man.


oh man. oh man. It is a huge loss for us. And it's scarier to think someone like that could be so lost to himself.

BUt what does "someone like that" mean? How do I know what he was like? I don't. And even his wife, his mom, his dad, probably are not a whole lot closer to what it was like to BE him. To be inside his head. And that is the great mystery and paradox of this life, of this consciousness. NO ONE CAN SEE INSIDE YOU.

Think about the autonomy! Think about the freedom! Think about the privacy.

No one knows what goes on inside you.





We answer to ourselves, ourselves only. To our own conscience. That is the ultimate judge, the ultimate god. But maybe we can get to know our god. Get to know how our conscience is formed (how much of it is the superego, paternal authority figure, etc),and if any of it is simply irreducibly There. The little voice inside you, your soul, etc. I don't know what any of those really mean but one option is to engage our sense of right & wrong in a dialogue. We do this all the time of course, with various frequencies depending on the person, but maybe a more conscious dialogue. A written one perhaps, with a particular situation from our life as a jumping off point. Alternately (or supplementarily) the Buddhists would recommend that we not engage in a dialogue but step back and observe the edicts of our inner judge and any reactions/responses we have to these. For me, observation is hard because I always think of it as a reporting position. As in-- okay, I'm in the field, collecting data on the mating behavior of these gorillas (which describes my mind quite well) and now that I have the findings-- who do I go to?

A scientist of the mind. I like that. Especially since Jane Goodall is one of my heroes.

And so was DFW. Maybe that's why it's sad. When your hero kills himself.

Crones and Drones

So I just saw "The Women" starring most of the female actresses in Hollywood. There's Meg Ryan (flappy-floppy as ever), Annette Bening (where Diane Keaton should be), Jada Pinkett-Smith and Debra Messing. Even Bette Midler shows up as a (who else?) loudmouthed multiple divorcee. I'd planned to see the original George Cukor film first but circumstances dictated otherwise. Therefore, I can't offer an informed comparison between the two just yet. Nonetheless, I want to record my initial reactions hot off the movie seat.

It's telling that the last words of this version of "The Women" are: "It's a boy." This is a reason for joy, an ultimate fulfillment in the storyline for one of the characters. And though there are NO MEN in the movie, the patriarchal, old boys' style of thinking (manifest in the shameless commercialism and googly-eyed admiration of all things high-society NYC) permeates the movie like musk. From the first shot of the movie, you know there's nothing new to expect. A camera tracks fast over a blue body of water to reveal... the Manhattan skyline! It doesn't help that the first shots of the movie are straight-up product placements as an unidentified female protagonist struts into Saks Fifth Avenue and surveys the store through Terminator-like vision, pinpointing items of desire Prada Shoes --Must Have! Cartier Perfume...New Line!. The woman is revealed to be Annette Bening whose body language is a direct imitation of Samantha from Sex and the City and whose next encounter reveals the other side of the movie--- false female empowerment. As she strides through the store she is interrupted by a sales girl who asks her if she wants a facelift in a bottle. This is my face. Deal with it. Says Bening, tossing her head saucily.



And yet soon enough we see Candice Bergen (who is pretty fucking good I must say) in a post-facelift relaxation room looking for all the world like a burn victim and telling her daughter that she had to get one-- "Haven't you noticed? There are no sixty year old women in New York. I was the only one." It's funny but as her daughter admits, she will be in her place in another 20 years. So it's just a matter of time before we must stop asking the world to deal with our aging faces.

To make things worse, Bening is the high-powered editor in chief of some women's magazine who is having crises of conscience about the messages they are giving women. WHAAA? This whole movie is like a video-stream of Cosmo magazine. Not only is the hand-wringing about the models not being real people hypocritical, but it's also tired and cliche. Speaking of which, the writing in the movie is predictable to eye-muscle-fatigue-inducing levels. When Meg Ryan tells her mom she has no idea what it feels like to be betrayed old Candice (bless her sporting heart) heaves a deep sigh and says: "Let me take a guess... You feel you've been struck right in the stomach." No WAY! "You feel like you're in a dream... you know the one.. where you're falling and you can't stop." Get OUT Candice Bergen! Oh man, I bet YOU were betrayed too once! It all makes so much sense now.

Meg Ryan is "a good person. You know, I give money to homeless people. I recycle." Both these quotes had an invaluable third to strenghten their triptych of association, but I don't remember what. Suffice it to say, you've heard it before.

So I feel disappointed. I don't know what I was expecting. But this makes me feel depressed. Oh yes, when Meg Ryan takes a hit off of a joint she says-- you'll never guess! "I haven't done this since freshman year in college." Which is interesting ultimately because that's the level of maturation that any of these women have. That's the level of thought that this movie is aimed at. Which is not to diss college freshwommmyns, many of whom, I know from being their teacher, are way more articulate and composed. Add to all of these the fact that the women of the women are all your two-dimensional Sex and the city stereotypes, you find yourself nodding in beleaguered approval to people all over the world who announce "It's a Boy!" with something more than parental joy.

The Inner Fascist

Talking to Sol the other day I whipped out the phrase "the inner fascist." That is what I call the side of me that does not tolerate weakness or failure. That reveres strength and power in a fanatical way.

I suppose we all have an inner fascist. I mean, how can you have ideals without value judgments? Unless you're a Taoist, in which case you know that being "weak"-- i.e. small, flexible, humble like a blade of grass-- is real strength. Just think of how a big oak gets uprooted and falls in a storm. Ah but I'm no Taoist, as you can see from my inadequate explanations of that line of thought. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we privilege certain parts of duality like Strength, Beauty, Intelligence, Light, Height, etc. But I guess when we become slaves of this qualification instead of its masters, then we are fascists. But look at my word choices! Slaves vs. Masters. And I privilege the latter.

This stuff is entrenched. Ain't no easy way out. I'm just writing stream of thought here so I'm myself surprised that Taoism came up. But it does seem pretty relevant.

So, a Taoist approach may help with keeping the inner fascist under control but for me, the best antidote to the inner fascist is compassion. And empathy. Of this I am sure. When Murat was trying to quit smoking he was being really hard on himself during his lapses. I told him to be nicer, and mentioned the inner fascist. He imagined it as a dictator of small stature-- little Hitler, he called it. He would give reports on little Hitler's behavior throughout the days, laughing at him and occasionally falling prey to his moods. Mostly, though, he learned to be kind to his little Hitler-- and I think at some point little Hitler jumped into his arms.

I watched a documentary a long time ago about the Holocaust and it was made by a female psychologist (it was like half documentary interviews, half drama, can't remember the name or track it down) but the central tenet of the movie was that it was the lack of empathy that was the most clear cause of the atrocities in the Holocaust. There are other factors of course, but I was reminded of this film when I watched Elephant the other day and then did some research on the Columbine massacres. There was a good article in Slate that said that Eric Harris, the mastermind of the two youths, was a psycopath and described that condition as having ZERO understanding of what someone else is feeling, or that they are feeling anything at all. Complete lack of empathy.

I guess I'd heard this before but it blows my mind. It's fascinating, and horrible. Then, as I was trying to google-track down that movie I mentioned above, I came across this essay http://www.crisispapers.org/essays8p/empathy.htm which mentions the findings of a psychologist named G.M. Gilbert who studied the Nuremberg trials. Apparently the essay is quoting yet another movie (goddamn! why do movies shape so much of our reality-- it's always scared me) but says it seems a correct representation of the real Gilbert's findings when he says "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."

So there we have it. Psychopaths and Nazis and You. My friend. Yes, you. Yes, me. I'm gonna take a step further and say this: The reason "Evil" is so fascinating is because it exists in all of us. We all have our psychopath moments. It's actually a really preferable option in many cases to shut ourselves down and not imagine how someone else feels. And if you were to open yourself up, to talk about these things, you expose yourself to ridicule. It's easy to make fun of "feelings." To call this stuff namby-pamby, to characterize it as (oh, what's this?) "feminine." I've been listening to a lot of shock-jock radio recently (don't ask why but it's for reasons beyond my power) and those guys' reverence of toughness is really a transparent terror of facing and accepting any "weak" parts of themselves.

So what I'm saying is, watch out for little Hitler. He comes dressed in all kinds of guises. Often, that guise is You. But when you see the little guy, just ask him to come sit on your knee, and slick his hair to the side and give him a pacifier shaped like a cigarette. He'll start sighing and falling asleep soon enough.

Hanging with Tu-pac

Upon arriving in Ersas, our summer house, two days ago, I was happy to see my old friend Tuana. We spent the whole day today swimming and laying out on the beach. She's so much fun to be around! Her mom works at the cafe we have on the premises; cooking, serving tea and coffee, and generally trying to appease the grumpy old bastards who dominate the populace here. For example, Tuana's uncle got so mad while serving dinner last night that he put his fist through the glass of the bread cabinet. It was a big hubbub and some of the aforementioned g.o.bs threatened to call the police.

Besides swimming, we made some sand art:



That's Cinderella on the left and her fairy godmother on the right. As you can see, Tuana likes to work more in the abstract (I did old cindy). I'm glad she's gonna be around since I don't have many other companions here. We took a final picture to commemorate the day:

Report from the Airport

Report from the Airport


Sacred body, profane soul.

The sign said Meditation Centre and I was immediately hooked. I'd been to
one of these before in an American airport, I'm trying to remember which one
it was. Possibly Minneapolis, or Detroit. There it was called a Prayer Room
and it was tucked away in a far away corridor in a corner of the airport.
Nonetheless, it was a good experience. Judging by what I've seen here I can
say these places are both calming, sanctuary-like but also kind of creepy.
The carpeting is a negligible color like grey or teal, and folks often take
off their shoes. The rooms are empty and strange-- like empty conference
rooms more than anything. In the Meditation Centre here there were chairs
and a table and non-representational stained glass panels at regular
intervals in front of the frosted glass windows.


But I got no kind of meditation done. It started before I even entered, when
I realized I was wearing a tank top. It's not particularly revealing but it
is a tank top. You don't enter mosques with those and I recalled in a flash
reading on websites of Buddhist retreats where they asked the attendees to
refrain from wearing tank tops. So I put on my sweater. Which, you know, is
no big deal, not a wrenching concession, and yet it is a concession, and one
whose necessity I'm not entirely convinced of. I understand that you should
not be falling out of your jeans or shirt or whatever, keeping the t&a to a
minimum, but a tank top seems to be pushing it. Also, and here's the heart
of the matter, it just seems to apply more to women. Out bodies are more
profane, more suggestive, more explosive, or at least that is how we are
raised to feel. By "we" what do I mean? I'm not sure the we applies to
American women of my age-- I don't know how self-conscious they feel about
the way their sexuality is perceived, about how much they objectify
themselves. So maybe I should speak with the safer "I", the formation of
which I will summarize thus: raised in a secular, middle-class Turkish
family, as an almost completely nominal Muslim, educated in schools and
countries all over the world, and a US resident for the last 17 years or so.
Age 31. So that's the stats folks. Yeah, the we really makes no sense
because I have lots of Turkish girlfriends who seem much more liberated
about their sexuality, more accepting of themselves as sexual beings. I
attribute this difference to their more established urbanity-- they come
from families who have been big-city dwellers for many generations. My
father's side comes from a provincial town in the Thrace region of Turkey
(the European part of the country).


as i write this my fellow passengers on the KLM 1613 from Amsterdam to
Turkey are filing past me. people are so weird and varied. so many different
shapes, hairy forearms, stumpy fingers, so many crazy riffs on the same
theme. at the moment i feel charitable and so they all seem beautiful to me.
A whole host of african women in islamic headdress, different from the
turkish AKP headscarf. Children, brushing past with that wonderful
indifference to touch that they still have. *



Anyhow, back to the meditation on the Meditation Centre. As I was saying, I
am only a little ways removed from the provincial mindset of Tekirdag, one
which is more socially conservative than religiously conservative, but like
most value systems, uses the female body as its currency and soapbox
nevertheless. So what this translates to, in my life, is being frequently
self-conscious about how I'm perceived, particularly in regards to "virtue."
Yet at the same time I'm sort of a hippie at heart and couldn't care less.
It's in the US that I can don the latter identity more freely, and that is
part of the reason I prefer to live there. I'm not as worried about my
nipples asserting themselves or my dress being too sheer when I walk around
on the street in the US. These seem like trifles on the surface, and also as
more obvious trademarks of public dress code in Muslim countries-- the stuff
you see as Tips in any tourist guide. But there's a lot lying underneath it,
especially if you are from the country itself.


So I went in there and there were a few guys praying on the free prayer rugs
provided by the center, facing east. I felt a bit at a loss as to what to
do. My body, just released from 7 hours in a transatlantic economy class
flight, was longing to stretch and ease itself. But, if wearing tank tops is
inappropriate, isn't doing yoga worse? But how stupid! Why this
sexualization of yoga poses? Am I in denial here? The asanas are spiritual
and meditational practices, simply more physicalized. In fact, being right
next to the praying Muslims it was impossible to not notice the similarity
of the movements between their movements and sun salutations. But it was
specifically the Muslims who put me on edge, sort of nailed into my body,
trying to satisfy my aching limbs with Tadasana, mountain pose. I was
worried about their approbation, and about causing them to break their
ablutions, which in Turkish we call "abdesti bozmak" . The idea is that, by
washing their hands and feet in a ritual manner, the worshippers are
purifying not just their body but also their minds of impure thoughts. This
state is necessary to enter prayer and lasts until after prayer. There are
many things that can break the purified state, lust being among the first.
So, while possibly flattering myself that I could be the cause of such a
phenonmenon, my point is that it's actually the complete opposite--there is
nothing appealing about that prospect. It's simply filled with shame, like
you are this dangerous vessel, like a loaded shotgun, that needs to be
carried gingerly, handled with care. When in fact it's the men who are the
loaded guns and it's the other point I have about not flattering myself with
the thought: most any female figure bending over is a possible breaker of
the man's absolution.

But

why do I care?

I hate that I automatically inhabit this male consciousness, that I am more
protective of a stranger's virtue than my own peace of mind. And isn't that
weird I said virtue, cuz my protection of my own virtue is basically in
order to protect the men's virtue ultimately. You know, don't be a cause of
temptation, don't make the men feel bad about their own desirousness. Or
something. GodDAMN! It makes me so mad. And in the Meditation Centre here I
am finally decided upon zazen, sitting there thinking "Breathing in, I am
aware that I am breathing in... breathing out..." but I can't stop wanting
to stretch, and so I'm hyper conscious of the guys' presences, wishing they
would leave so I could be alone in the room. It's the most unmeditative
state imaginable. In fact, it's downright misanthropic, that's what this
fear and worry turned me into: crabby, hypersensitive bundle of nerves and
aching muscles.


I know I could have done all my scandalous bends and twists out on the
airport floor, in some discreet corner somewhere, and I've done it before in
the past. Still weird and awkward, though. Also, the Meditation Centre had a
nice plush carpet and it was nice and quiet. Finally everyone left and I got
to do some stretching but I was so afraid of being caught in the act that it
wasn't that relaxing.


Am I being too self-conscious about yoga? Maybe, but the feelings of shame,
virtue, bodily terror were triggered by the praying Muslims and gave me a
necessary reminder of the mental state that awaits me upon my return to
Turkey. And here, I want to emphasize the idiosyncracy of my perspective.
Like I said, there are plenty of women in Turkey who work it and don't care,
who don't have the hangups that I do. Basically, what I'm saying is, these
feelings are the results of as much personal hangups as social realities.

change in a vase

like a bird on a wire

like a drunk in a midnight choir

i have tried, in my way, to be free

Walking down a country road, so many bones and bodies, so many forms disintegrating on the gravel. A jawbone, delicate as carved ivory, a patch of fur, the trace of wings turned up into the air. And I look up to the sky, half meaty grey, half clear blue, and all I want is you, god, all I want is you. 

Walking through the earth, through all these incorporations of form and matter, all these creatures of breath and shape, all the insane variations of motion, I have reached the age of thirty one and still it only occurs to me to ask why. Haven't I learned my lesson? Haven't I heard the Buddhist teachers, haven't I been told by friends and strangers to give it up? Don't I know god is in the details? Don't I know better?

But I've given up looking for sense. No more looking for the blueprint. No more Platonic ideals. But the why drives me, drags me on, like the carrot on the stick, like the golden thread through the labyrinth. 

I'm packing up my whole house. Dragging all the bags of letters, boxes of pictures, piles of notebooks out of the closets and getting lost in their labyrinths of memory, self. What to do with these things? They exhaust me, but I can't give them up. Mike said "memories are like stones and you're trying to swim." I said "how can you be such an unfeeling person" and he said "I was mostly joking." But I was really arguing with myself. 

This old outcast guy, Vahdet, from my summer house, once told me about some writer he knew who had burned all his notebooks. That's a real writer, he said. A student of mine once wrote a good poem about how Bakhtin had burned the only copy of his manuscript (or rather, used the paper to roll cigarettes). Is this guts? My mother burned all her journals and asks me intermittently if I still have mine. She regrets it.

When you're tired of swimming, let go and float for a while. Float in the ocean of existence, in the knowledge that you are the ocean, the Tao. All these books and pictures, they're all my resistance to change. And within the notebooks are chronicled over and over the same resistance to change. But if the only constant is change, then I'm holding on for dear life to temporality. These notebooks and pictures, these cards and vases, these shrines, these mirrors, these handcarved necklaces-- these are what keep me mortal, and I'm holding on to them for all I'm worth. 

TUR-Ki-YE! TURKIYE!

Turkey just came back from being down 2-0 against the Czech Republic and beat them 3-2! It was AMAZing to watch! I want to run around on the street draped in a flag, yell and hug strangers, grow hoarse from celebrating. Man, do I wish I was in Turkey right now. I called my brother and could hear all the car horns beeping away on the street. Now I turned on the TV but all there is is freaking NASCAR and Sportscenter has an interview with the whole Manning clan. The three of them (father and both sons) are standing sheepishly before the camera in matching polos and reminiscing about their Father's Day traditions.

Man! What the F? I want to see people talking about THE GAME! I want to hear analysis of the positions, fellow marveling, wonder, acknowledgment of the glorious game and comeback and victory that I just witnessed! Is that too much to ask, people? Huh? How is it that this entire country does not give a hoot about soccer? I mean, I know that's how it's always been and everything but you cannot imagine how lonely it feels to be just stifled with a great big joy in your throat. It's like a bite you can't swallow. It's stuck! I'm stuck! I'm stuck out here in the world's most anachronistic boondock, with a bunch of people who don't care that Jesus just walked on water!

argh. Yes, I exaggerate, but only a little. Ah well, my dears, at least I can release my emotions to you! You should have seen it: First of all, the Czechs are at least 6 inches taller than the Turkish team, so they get all the headers. In the first half they kept the ball in the air most of the time and scored one goal. In the second half Turkey was attacking a lot but then the Czechs got a fast break and scored a second goal. It really seemed all over-- I was sure that we were outclassed, as well as  topped. But then, at the 76th minute! we got a goal. And then we tied on the 83rd minute and then we scored the winning goal a few minutes after that. It was so crazy tense: this would have been the first time in history an elimination round went to penalty kicks if we had tied: so dead even were the scores between the Czech Republic and Turkey. And then, after we got the lead and there were another 4 unbearably long minutes of stoppage time our goalie Volkan shoved and felled this big oaf Koller (who looks like the non-Buscemi killer guy from Fargo) and, to be honest, helped me get a vicarious thrill, but at the same time the ref saw so he got a red card and got KICKED OUT of the game! We had no one to put in his stead (all the substitutions were used up) so Tuncay, one of the forwards, put on the goalie jersey and he looked so hilariously shrunken between the goals it was terrifying. But we did it we did it we diiid it! Turkey is now in the quarter finals!

So, watch the quarter finals game -- this Friday I think. Turkey plays Croatia this time. And then we can talk about it... right here, if nowhere elese.

beginnings and middles and ends

any light drowns out the light

the weaker light, the incandescent heinies of the fireflies flush against the sky blinking on and off like the planes higher above, and the stars higher still. love is like light not like labels: i just watched Sex and the City (the movie) and it disturbs me how easily they concatanate the two. I guess I should have known, but still. I wish labels were so attractive to me: how easy they are to attain, to have and hold and be fulfilled with. And I wish marriage was the happy ending, but it's not. It just ain't. I don't understand why we keep buying into it, what's so attractive about the happy ending. I think it's not the happy part but the ending part that's so attractive. The idea that it'll all be over once you get there, a sort of secular nirvana. 

But I digress. And that's sort of the point of these blogs, to digress freely (Digression! remember Catcher in the Rye?). Let's return to the here and now. The here is Freeville, NY, an address I keep but a town I've never been to. The actual place is a road out in the country, a sweet house I've all but destroyed in my fits of winter frenzy this past year, neighbored by a swamp full of dead tree trunks which serves as a nesting ground for herons and (by the sounds of it) a city of frogs. The aforementioned fireflies are out on the lawn, moving to and fro against the backdrop of dark pines, carrying their lovelorn light in all directions. 

This morning I took a walk and saw: meadows filled with buttercups and horses, a dead bat by the side of the road no bigger than a folded dollar bill, phlox, daisies, and two kinds of butterflies: one yellow with black dots (dead) and one black with yellow, blue and red dots (alive and "flitting and fluhting" as David Attenborough likes to say). They were like a positive and negative image of each other. The yellow one reminds me of the other day when I was driving down the country roads at a pace, all mad with pain and self-directed rage, just hurtling down the asphalt in my blue pickup listening probably to the classic rock station and I saw this big yellow butterfly flitting before me and for a moment I was taken out of my doldrums (beauty has a way of doing that) and then the butterfly was on my windshield, stuck in the wipers, helpless against the wind and the velocity battering its wings. 

"And all men kill the thing they love,

By all, let this be heard,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword."

That's Oscar Wilde believe it or not, from the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Maybe it was that maudlin sensibility he tried to cover up with his more famous and ultimately tiresome aphorisms. I don't know. I've had one Saranac and it's putting me in a mood. There, now I have another. 

"To alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!" That's Homer talking and don't you know. This reminds me of AA which I sat in on a few times in the past months due to a friend who started the program. I've never had alcohol really be either cause or solution to my problems and for that I am thankful, but I realized going to those meetings that alcohol gave those folks a reason to be there-- a label if you will-- that brought them to this ingenious human convention. In Turkish it's called a "kulp" which literally means the handle of a vessel. The thing you pick it up with. Maybe framework is a better word for the whole AA thing: once you identify (and admit) yourself as an alcoholic, then there's this vast support network to help you through your troubles. I'm not trying to downplay the extent of those troubles. I was particularly moved by the testimonial of a man who told the story of meeting folks in prison who were in there for murders they'd committed while being blackout drunk, and he'd thought to himself: that could have been me. And soon after that I watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents-- often wry, dark segments of fantasy and crime-- which dealt very seriously with a similar story featuring an alcoholic heroine and at the end of which Hitchcock appeared not with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor but completely straight-faced and said "we've diverged a bit from our usual path tonight in the hopes that this episode, adapted from a short story by Adela Rogers St. John, will somewhere, somehow, help someone." Not an exact quote, but close. Comedy's good and all, but especially when it comes from an unlikely source, a bit of serious drama is just so much better.

Anyway, what I was saying is that I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being an alcoholic, but I appreciate the access that gives one to a resource like AA where people simply share their stories, their experience, without the fear of judgment. Oh I know, even as I write this, that I sound naive, and I'm even aware of the somewhat self-involved, victim-mentality that this program invites, but I was so surprised and relieved (or released) to find myself in a space where people could share their most secret, most shame-inducing stories with each other, that I developed a good respect for the program. And the best part of it is, that people Listen to each other, and through that listening, through the Sharing, they learn that they are not alone and that it helps to listen as well as be heard. 

Now where are we? That is not a full-stop above. There is never a full-stop. And if I know what's good for me I'll keep writing here until fate doles out my final stop. There is no ending, not until there is. 

First Thoughts on Exile

All my life, I've been a stranger. And all my life, I'll remain a stranger still. Yet this does not mean I can't be at home in every moment, at any place in the world. I carry the I like a mantle, a somewhat lugubrious disguise I have to wear everywhere, like a shaman with the head of a deer or a fifty pound beaded mask. 

(a tiny critter just crawled into my computer's air vent and reminded me of this joke: It's a Temel joke. Temel is the quintessential Laz, a resident of the Black Sea region in northern Turkey, and the jokes about him are somewhat similar to Polish jokes in the U.S., but not exactly. Temel is half fool half genius, as the Laz people are known for doing everything in a different kind of way-- they might seem really absent-minded at times but they can also be incredibly shrewd. The best way I remember it being described is, when told to grab their ears the Laz take their right arm over their head and grab their left ears.... Anyway, the joke: Temel is a watch repairman. One day his friend Dursun comes to him with a beloved watch, an heirloom from his grandpa, that has stopped working. Temel shakes the watch, puts it to his ear, turns the knob and stares at it for a while. Then he opens it up and what does he find inside but a dead ant. Uyy, Dursun! he exclaims. Of course your watch has stopped. Can't you see, the machinist is dead!)

Anyway, back to the whole exile thing. I got to thinking about it again lately because 1) I'm moving again, after having lived somewhere for four years (a long time for me) and 2) I just read this passage in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces which reminded me of the exile trope in an urgent way. I'll quote at length:

In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and a distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female; at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his life-role he is necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman, servant, or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun or harlot; he cannot be all. Hence, the totality--the fullness of man--is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence.[...] From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing--waste.  (pp.382-383)

So, after I read this, I felt kind of depressed. I mean, it's admittedly old-fashioned, what with all those universal men and medieval job descriptions, but what he's saying makes a lot of sense to me overall. The word that buzzes about me, settles on my brow, walks sticky-toed on my earlobe, creeps on my upper lip and rubs its legs together always is Contingency. Our consciousness is necessarily contingent, there is no getting around it, unless very consciously we try to get around it through meditation, etc. And why should we try to get around it, you might ask. Well, once you realize how contingent all those news and views are, how arbitrary the choices (and how culturally delineated the range of choices) are that people define themselves by, you kind of stop believing in anything. It's as though, afloat on a sea of signifiers, you are permanently shipwrecked, but without land in sight. This is when folks like me who are spiritually inclined look to religious traditions for the definition of self, for something unifying that exists among all, something to plant your feet on. Roots.

Shoots.

Leaves.

Not unimportant metaphors. I even have a poem about this, it goes like this:

Contingency Serenade

You all roll very funnily toward the grave!

You are extraneous:

spring ants in the airy house

all the ridiculous weathers you carry like reasons

You wince and shrug your maybe shoulders,

eat your macaroni dinners rubbing elbows

with bosses presidents and

your sons and your mysteries

you carry in cages!

Your: news views smells

your: dandelions knees spit buttocks

your: bozoukis

your: coffee rings and all the wealth of two spoonfuls of secrets stashed away in your snatches under your mattresses, your blistered tongues

Your brains are like birds

flung at walls

rub rub rub til the lamp is raw

tell the genie sing sing sing

damn you thwack you can't get enough

of this rubber ball bird this so very resilient thing

that breaks nonetheless it breaks

thwack sing you sonofabitch

You rain on the rooftop your plink plunk song your little ditty your broken charm bracelet.

That poem was born out of a sense of outrage at anyone's claim at legitimacy. And from the frustration of not being able to have that claim myself. By legitimacy I partly mean confidence. I am profoundly insecure at times but also sort of committed to being insecure. Not in the petty way that undermines people but like another version of humility. Who are you to say? Who are you anyway? That sort of thing. So I was glad to see Campbell go on like so:

But there is another way--in diametric opposition to that of social duty and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest. Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments.[...] The preliminary mediations of the aspirant detach his mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to the core. "I am not that and not that," he meditates: "not my mother or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition." By such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can return from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr. So-and-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A.--Society and duties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes indrawn and aloof. 

This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ultimate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one.[...] Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all.

The process Campbell talks about, though, is an arduous one. In The Conference of The Birds, an epic allegory from the 13th Century, Fariduddin al-Attar writes of this journey (towards enlightenment, finding one's true self) as one that ultimately lays most aspirants by the wayside. I think the popularization of such practices as Buddhism and Yoga in the west is a good thing but brings with it the danger of 1) missing the ultimate goal of the practice and 2) underestimating the length and difficulty of the journey itself. In fact, insofar as that goes, I wonder if it's not misleading to even think about the goal when pursuing a spiritual practice. I know you've got to know what you're going for, but the point in this case is you can't know, you can't Imagine what it is that you are in fact pursuing. So I feel when Campbell writes about this nice newly minted all essence self, he is in fact retelling a Myth not a fact. I don't doubt that people have reached that stage, but I doubt that Campbell himself has, and without the experience, all he can relate to us is the legend, like the City of Atlantis.  

So, back and forth, on the waves, we bob. I bob you bob and she bobs. I know the postmodernists say enjoy the free play and don't look for land, but sometimes it gets exhausting to doggie-paddle.