Eunuchtarianism

Well, my submittals didn't make the grade.

These did.

A sampling of some good ones:

Depressbyterians: Those who think the End of Days actually did come in 2000. (Russ Taylor, Vienna)

Eunuchtarians: A sect whose hymnal is written for sopranos only. Its most prominent evangelist is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. (Ira Allen, Bethesda)

Geek Orthodox: A sect that worships technology, but only up to the 2003 upgrades. (Peter Metrinko)

Hurling Dervishes: Believers in heavin' on earth. (Kevin Dopart, Washington)

Losering Your Religion

The Style Invitational, which honors its winners with the honorific "Loser," recently asked for new religions. My contributions, none of which made it into print, were:

Funyoumeantalism -- The belief that the road to heaven is paved with practical jokes. Those who see spiritual gain from attempted humor, even if misunderstood or not funny.

Solispsism -- The belieth that only the thelf exiths in the Univerth.

Awetism -- Belief system rooted in natural mysticism.

Ahhhtism -- The belief that pleasure is the basis of all goodness.

Pollism = System of dynamic beliefs derived from discerning the majority or prevailing beliefs of others.

Canservutism = radical notion that government consists of servants of the people.

Apothecarianism -- the belief that drugs are the way to salvation.

Pageanism -- the belief that salvation is attained through reading or writing voluminous scholarly works (espoused mainly by erudite academics).

Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

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peace


pacem in terris

Trois d'Haiku

twenty green towers

urban sunflower garden

one shining crown rules

cumulus breezes

clear cerulean backdrop

cicadas at noon

solo cardinal

barren pine branch skyward still

swaying after flight

A Life-or-Death Sentence of Near-CATastrophe

Miraculously exerting less force than usual, in the dark unlighted house I pushed down the side window near the stairway landing, to prevent rain from a potential storm, and felt a little give, a lumpy resistance, shockingly and alarmingly discovering the space below the window's downward trajectory regally occupied by Tommy the ginger cat, unmeowingly grateful (seemingly) that he had narrowly averted a modern-day guillotine-gruesome death, albeit entirely accidental, at my hands.

The Hit Charade

Jokingly, we used to say, sitting at a restaurant in Manhattan, any restaurant, don't sit with your back to the entrance door, sit facing the door, as if we were important enough to be rubbed out in a mob hit, and as if this seating arrangement would protect any one of us. This was in the days when Paul "Big Paulie" Castellano was in fact assassinated just outside Sparks restaurant off or on Third Avenue, not far from where I worked, and not too distant in time from when I, Pawlie Kokonuts, had walked by the steakhouse, which is now probably closed. Of course, it's not like one has to be important to be felled by mob bullets, or by anyone's bullets, or by anything. Collateral damage is the military term, ain't it. But the biggest fallacy of all, as we were saying at breakfast Saturday at the Good News Cafe, the biggest pretense of all is the illusion of control. Sure, if you had a machine gun, a Tommy gun, as it was called in the Al Capone days, you might be able to spray your attackers with hot metal before they got you. Maybe. But unlikely. You might more likely be in mid-bite of your ravioli or mid-dip of your bread into the olive oil or spreading butter on your bread or in latter-day modern life feeling your cellphone vibrate in your pants, only to realize it's your leg going numb from the onslaught of the loss of consciousness and blood in the final nanoseconds, just as you were formulating the syllables of a final joke about vibrators vibrate get it haha a joke they all have heard from you countless times haha as it dawns on you in the darkest of dawns that your dawns are over, buddy. The utter conceit of it all, to think you are not powerless, to think that your position, your positioning, your placement, your posturing, your posing, your pronouncing, your protecting will stave it off, will delay it, will forestall it, will spin a cocoon around it, will armor you against arms and the man, or woman, or transgendered, will make you quicker, safer, surer, you or yours, if only you had faced the entrance, if only sooner, later, this, that, a little over here, there, anywhere, everywhere, if maybe why not if that or this. The utter hubris of it. They say alcoholism is the disease of denial but the disease of denial is called by something else, a tiny four-lettered L word we all conspire to and with and for (and other prepositional propositions), something we all aspire to as we pray for its continuance fending off respirable dust unto dust, just as Father Luke once intoned or invoked, or maybe even choked on the words, I don't know.

And that, I postulate, as a poor postulant, is why the last episode of The Sopranos was right and fitting, in the familiar family way.

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.