hit 'return'

where were you
I was around, over there
where
on the other side
I have returned
I see that
I told you that "I shall return"
I don't remember that
you can look it up
I did. General Douglas MacArthur, and all that
it's complicated
what isn't
hero or coward
stunt or strategy
whatever works
whatever that means
why "shall" and not "will"
that's a whole nother story
other
what
whole other
either or

Broken Windows and Silver Doorknobs

Bad neighborhood. Sketchy. Rough area. Borderline. Ghetto. Have you heard any of these descriptions, however offensive they may strike you? Have you heard either more negative terms or their euphemistic replacements?

Come, take a walk with me.

No. Right now. Don't be afraid.

Observe this block. Schuyler Street. Take in the parade of two-story, two-family houses, built in the 1920s and '30s. Lawns manicured, adorned with daffodils, mulch, shrubs, trees. No litter. Structures not thirsting for paint or carpentry. Across the street, much the same: different architectural styles, smaller, more modest. Up the block, historic Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Graves dating to the 1800s, including that of a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Several blocks distant, over on Milton Avenue, a house overrun by fallen maple limbs and uncut grass, by weeds, a house choked by its longtime neglect, its metal fence interweaved by sprawling hedge branches, an empty pack of Newport 100s, a discarded Brisk ice tea, a crumpled invoice for car repair, a lone latex glove. An official notice of condemnation posted on a window and door. Blue recycle bins, tires, broken trikes, and split-open trash bags on Herkimer and Emerson. And up the hill, on Pharis Street, overlooking city and suburbs, a pristine lawn with a sign warning against having your dog use the lawn as a private bathroom, in front of a pristine Arts and Crafts bungalow freshly painted yellow, brown, and black, with a shock of red on the door.

Care and neglect coexisting. Pride and privation. Gain and loss. A fabric of multicolored threads and textures, sewn and patched, stitched and shored up. Some more than others, some less, some not at all.

Let's walk some more, keep pace, stretch your stride, down the hill, toward the creek. Oh, you'd rather not, this is a "bad neighborhood"? Be brave. Suck it up. Trust me. Really.

True, that broken, rusted pickup in the driveway looks unsavory, so does the mosaic of tossed Burger King wrappers and soda cups. An eyesore. It makes my eyes sore.

But look across the street, that Victorian painted lady, emerald and cream with surprises of vermilion. Do you see its new siding, every storm window sparkling new, the shiny metal roof? The rebuilt porch? That house could pass for brand-new if you didn't know better.

I am sure this is obvious, but I can't help noting it: we are not dodging bullets, street-corner hustlers do not catch our eye, wondering if we covet their gaze and proffered wares.

Form your own conclusions, as you will. 

In my Age of Coronavirus walks, the gods and goddesses of surprise have been my tour guides.

Surprise, surprise.

If we look for broken windows, they appear. If we search for silver doorknobs, we find them.

p.s. Ever hear the expression "my mind is a bad neighborhood"? (It's popular in wellness and recovery circles and can possibly be traced to an Anne Lamott quotation, but its provenance is uncertain.) As with the physical neighborhoods described above, be careful what you look for. As Leonard Cohen suggested, "look among the garbage and the flowers." You never know what you will find.

stories

"The universe is made up of stories, not atoms." -- Muriel Rukeyser

instant one-minute zen meditation quotation

"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, indescribably magnificent world in itself." -- Henry Miller

thinking and doing

Zen calendar quote today: "We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it." I disagree. I get the Zen point, but in practical terms, isn't it precisely the opposite? I understand getting lost in the full reality of something. Well, I don't "understand" that, but I admit the validity of the viewpoint, the total immersion of lived experience. And yet, think of ballet classes, batting coaches, pitching coaches, mechanics, tutors, writing teachers, et cetera ad infinitum. speaking of Latin, here's where "age quod agis" comes into play: "do what you are doing."

creativity. change. evolution

"When I draw and paint, the essential thing is not to know what I do, or else I cannot come to what I see."

-- Avigdor Arikha, 1929-2010

This is also true in writing.

And living, too.

a quotation about change

"In all that pertains to change in traditional patterns of thought or behavior, most human beings will demonstrate what may be called a left wing that welcomes it and a right wing that deplores it."

-- John Tracy Ellis

Agree.

Except: Isn't it more accurate to say "most human beings will demonstrate what may be called a left wing that welcomes it or a right wing that deplores it"?

And.

Or.

I typically, though not always, seek and welcome change, given proper constraints and consequences.

We need both of those wings to fly; perhaps that is why John Tracy Ellis used "and."

Unfortunately, with the megaphones of Fox News and the blatherings of talk radio, civil discourse is abandoned and this essential truth regarding change gets belittled, scorned, or ignored.

This quotation works well with the one from my post of April 26, 2010, below, from Markus Dohle of Random House, regarding fear.

What is it we fear about change?

If change brings dire consequences, and we can be certain of that, fear may make some sense. But does lack of change bring similar or worse results?

So, as Dohle says, "fear is not a very good consultant," and I submit this holds true in the arena of change.

What do I fear regarding change?

What do you fear regarding change?

Why?

quotable quotation quote

It has been said that fear is the chief activator of our character defects.

I concur. That surely makes sense in terms of personal growth, or its lack.

"If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant."

-- Markus Dohle, chairman and CEO of Random House, as quoted by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010. (The discussion concerned pricing negotiations regarding e-books.)

True in the mercantile arena too.

spin doctor, spinster, spindrift, etc.

We were driving along on a Syracuse snow-strewn boulevard and saw a car with Florida plates and not very helpful tires (a very damaged car at that) navigating (more like circumnavigating or quasinavigating) the roadway, and a spousal observer offered her opinion:

"They do a lot of spinning and not much traction."

I quickly quipped:

"Lots of spinning and not much traction. Sounds like my life."

quote

"You have to live in the now, and you make your now."

-- Suzanne Farrell, as quoted in The Washington Post, October 5, 2008

A profound observation, really. And the quotation has two provocative and evocative elements: the part before the comma and the part after the comma.

It reminds me of someone I knew 20+ years ago in New Jersey. He was a member of a 12 Step program. He would say, "The now. N.O.W. There's no other way." It took me in my denseness a while to get it.

"In

an

utter

emptiness

anything

can

take

place."


John Cage

The English Major, Edited

In the last several years I've become an ardent fan of the novelist and poet Jim Harrison. For lack of a better description, he's a man's writer. And there are not many of those. But he also can be described as a nature writer and a philosophical explorer. His characters, and his prose, are down-to-earth inventions: accessible and reachable.

I find Jim Harrison's writing humorous, tragic, reflective, original, authentic.

You hear real voices.

I enjoyed his recent The English Major so much that I practically read it in one sitting.

I have a habit of dog-earing (dog-earring?) pages for later reference, mining for Laughorisms, aphorisms, maxims, and epigrams.

This work gave me these tidbits (neither endorsed nor opposed by The Laughorist):

-- "Time tricks us into thinking we're part of her and then leaves us behind."

-- "Weather-wise was it autumn or early winter in my life?"

-- ". . . I drove off with the unprofound thought of the hopelessness of sex to improve the human condition. Perhaps I should drive to New York City and announce this to the United Nations."

-- "I suddenly felt like I had as a boy on my first descending elevator down in Grand Rapids. Who and where was the driver?"

-- " 'Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.' "

-- "Given the right tools men will always murder each other."

-- "What I missed was no longer there or on the verge of disappearing."

-- "Fuimus fumus, or something like that, said Thomas Wolfe, my hero when I was in senior high school. I think it meant that our life goes up in smoke." [actually "we were smoke"]

-- ". . . my frizzy-haired assistant professor would wear his bell-bottoms at a student cafe and say 'All power to the people.' I was never sure what people he meant."

-- ". . . no creature in nature jogs."

-- ". . . alcohol was the writer's black lung disease."

-- " . . . he told me that self-pity was a ruinous emotion. 'Look at the world, not up your ass.' It took me a while to figure this out."

-- "When you don't have much to do, why rush?"

-- " 'I won every argument and I was always wrong.' "

-- " 'Some men will climb the same mountain hundreds of times while other men need to climb hundreds of mountains.' "

-- ". . . I recalled James Joyce's motto 'Silence, exile, cunning,' . . . "

Being a persnickety wordsmith guy, though, I can't resist pointing out something that the author, his editor, or a copy editor should have caught, especially because the protagonist was, after all, an English major:

"Tragedy struck little Lothar a scant week after I brought she and her mother home from the dog pound."

She?

Shame!

Vision Fission Fusion

The other day, my Zen Calendar had this quotation:

"As a man is, so he sees." -- William Blake

I dare say, au contraire:

As a man sees, so he is.

It's odd that a zen calendar wouldn't see things that way, the latter way. After all, see the whole universe in one drop of dew on a blade of grass. That sort of thing. I remember a line in one of John Updike's Rabbit books, Rabbit Is Rich, I believe, something like, "When you feel better you see better." That too. Or vice versa. It might all sound counterintuitive, but it's the same thing as: "You can act yourself into a new way of thinking." When I first heard that, I thought they were crazy, but it has turned out to be empirically true for me and many others.

Zen in the Art of Anything

Raymond Davidson also introduced me to Eugen Herrigel, who wrote Zen in the Art of Archery, which, I learned, predated the popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

I remember copying quotations from Herrigel's little gem, and they helped me to get through stressful days soberly and sanely.

Some say Herrigel's stuff is more archery lesson than zen. I say, who cares?

One of the quotations, which I can't find precisely, went something like this: "You can't be a master archer if you worry too much where the arrow will go. You can be a master archer even if you miss the target every time."

I guess I'll have to go buy another copy of the book (can't find it) or rely on all of you to get the quote right.

Here are some Eugen Herrigel tidbits I've rounded up:


The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.


The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.

If everything depends on the archer's becoming purposeless and effacing himself in the event, then its outward realization must occur automatically, in no further need of the controlling or reflecting intelligence.

This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and the impossible, so unswerving is its power - this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless, was called by the Masters truly "spiritual."



"Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery. Not the danger of wasting himself in idle self-gratification - for the East has no aptitude for this cult of the ego - but rather of getting stuck in his achievement, which is confirmed by his success and magnified by his renown: in other words, of behaving as if the artistic existence were a form of life that bore witness to its own validity.
"The teacher foresees this danger. Carefully and with the adroitness of a psychopomp he seeks to head the pupil off in time and to detach him from himself. This he does by pointing out, casually and as though it were scarcely worth a mention in view of all that the pupil has already learned, that all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as "himself". Only the spirit is present, a kind of awareness which shows no trace of egohood and for that reason ranges without limit through all distances and depths, with "eyes that hear and with ears that see."


When I asked the Master how we could get on without him on our return to Europe, he said: "Your question is already answered by the fact that I made you take a test. You have now reached a stage where teacher and pupil are no longer two persons, but one. You can separate from me any time you wish. Even if broad seas lie between us, I shall always be with you when you practice what you have learned. I need not ask you to keep up your regular practicing, not to discontinue it on any pretext whatsoever, and to let no day go by without your performing the ceremony, even without bow and arrow, or at least without having breathed properly. I need not ask you because I know that you can never give up this spiritual archery. Do not ever write to me about it, but send me photographs from time to time so that I can see how you draw the bow. Then I shall know everything I need to know.

Broad seas now separate Raymond and me, alas, but this quote gives me solace and connection. But I draw the bow as a novice.