‘Tis the final weekend for the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival. I presume I’ll find my way there this coming weekend. The festival is a complete delight, with free admission (donation suggested), no seating (bring a blanket and picnic), and amateur Shakespeare done with zest. The productions have been anchored for many years now by the actor David Aston-Reese, who I see is directing this year, I don’t know if he’s performing as well. Aston-Reese was Prospero last year, Falstaff the year before, and played an immortal Benedick in 2003. He alone is worth the trip to Woodstock. This year is All’s Well That Ends Well, and the conceit, as I hear, is that it takes place in 1969, the year of the Woodstock Festival itself. It looks like we may have a dry week leading up to it as well, which makes blanket-seating much more pleasant.
The Woodstock Shakespeare Festival.
30-Aug-09Dead Porcupine.
30-Aug-09
Multa novit vulpes, ericius unum magnum. “The fox knows many tricks, the porcupine one good one.” Unfortunately it didn’t work this time for him. I don’t know how he died, but he certainly did get eaten – there was nothing left but a few large vertebrae, some hair, and the quills. I was surprised at how soft the quills were – perhaps they soften as they decay, or perhaps they fill with some fluid to stiffen them when necessary. I found him walking from my cabin down to town via a woods trail.
Actors, Pretenders.
28-Aug-09I used to be very into the Christian concept of “polyglossia” – that the Gospel is translatable and works well in any language – in contrast, say, to the Islamic idea that God really can only express himself the way he really wants in one language. But recently I’ve been more intrigued by the things you can find out by looking specifically at the Greek. My latest discovery came a few nights ago – that hypocrites, in Greek, almost always transliterated as “hypocrite” – Jesus’ favorite term for the Pharisees – is the Greek word for “actor.” This changes things a bit, does it not? While there is a link between hypocrisy and acting, the connotation of the former is now entirely moral, which may not be the main problem. For does this not identify much more acutely the problem with deeply religious people? They’re working from a script, rather than allowing themselves to be alive to the moment, and pretending, rather than allowing themselves to be. We’ve certainly all seen people who are “actors,” thinking that the written script is much better than anything they could come up with on their own – and that God really just wants people to stick to the script.
Two Pieces in Gothamist.
28-Aug-09Two pieces I penned for Gothamist.
http://gothamist.com/2009/08/26/post_129.php
http://gothamist.com/2009/08/26/out_of_control_barbecuing.php
Helen Luke’s Way of Discrimination.
26-Aug-09“Seems, madame? Nay it is; I know not seems.” – Hamlet
Helen Luke is not one of the easier writers to write about. She appeared as a guide in my life when I began to feel the difference between exterior and interior, fact and meaning, appearance and reality. These distinctions are not for everyone nor for all stages of life. But at some point you may find that marriage is not love, baptism not conversion, reputation not excellence, work not productive; and you may begin to wonder what reality is, and why all these things people spend their whole lives pursuing seem so strange and hollow.
The experience of reading her best work is like time spent in the desert, a stripping away of all superficies, a return to simplicity. She began writing only in her sixties, when many of the things that seem so important have already lost their luster. Her autobiography is astonishing in this regard: she requires fewer than eighty pages to cover the (then) seventy years of her life, and such seemingly significant details as the names and life-paths of her children are never even mentioned. And yet perhaps thirty pages of the text are devoted to narrating her dreams. She follows this autobiography with what she calls “A Diary of Vowels,” i.e. the voice without the consonants, the life itself stripped of details. Her topics are personal relationships with people in times of transition, dreams, overcoming ego-attachments, and wise sayings found in books.
For some this is hopelessly vague, and not helpful in overcoming the numerous practical obstacles of physical existence. Yet for many others for whom life offers such a wealth of details and so little meaning, and so much activity and so little satisfaction, or Luke’s writing is like an honest conversation in the midst of much pretense.
The source of most of this pretense is overrationalization, the reduction of human life to externals and the mechanical multiplication of those externals to cover the inner emptiness. The two traditional primary modes of sifting through this welter of superficiality are dreams and sex, because here the rational mind is least in control – whence most of modern psychoanalysis. The content of our dreams and the contours of our sexual desire reveal much that the mind effectively hides otherwise. Luke deals only indirectly with sex, which is deeply idiosyncratic anyway, although her thorough explorations of gender, marriage, and birth lead one to sex easily enough. Her main quarries for finding what is significant in human life are dreams and literature, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to the oracular I Ching.
The approach is reminiscent of Joseph Campbell. Both Campbell and Luke were born in the same year and both were especially attracted to the work of Jung (both spent some time working directly with him in Switzerland). But whereas Campbell was an academic and focused on ideas, Luke is far more personal, valuing especially growth through personal crisis and relationship. In doing so she teaches “the way of discrimination:”
In relationship there are no rules, only basic guiding lines, and each tiny situation must be met as something unknown in which we must seek reality and love through a new effort of discrimination. (154)
For a wise life, this discernment must be continually employed. It is the process by which one looks past the rules to find the right, past the roles to find connection, past the merely important to find the essential. Luke wrote essay after essay of exploration on these topics, completely convinced of the need for perseverance and devotion. From “The Vows of the Interior Life,” on a life of devotion, be it marital, artistic, or religious:
There is plenty of adultery between very respectable married couples, for every mating is adulterous where there is no love and no creation. (184)
True imagination is born only out of the clearest possible discrimination of facts exactly as they are, and the penetration through them to the symbol beyond them. This is why the man or woman who is obedient to his or her imaginative vision inherits the earth. The down-to-earth facts of everyday life are filled with meaning, and transformed by the image, they too become truth. (187)
Her points on the need for constant creation in the marital relationship, and the continual birth of new life, particularly from sex, lead her to the most acute and perceptive attack on Church prohibitions on birth control I have ever read. But even more interesting is the mere fact that she writes so convincingly of the fundamental sameness of the life of devotion, either to spouse or art or God. From “Courtesy,” on true nobility:
Aristocracy means government by the “best,” the most noble, and in the mature psyche it means the preeminence of the objective, impersonal values over the little personal demands of the ego. So the royal quality, the aristocratic principle, is that which brings courtesy, is that which annihilates at once all feeling of superiority or inferiority between person and person. Only a true inner hierarchy of values can bring true equality of persons also, this equality – another paradox – can only exist where there is accurate discrimination of factual differences of ability and knowledge. In the counterfeit gentleman, high birth and breeding, or any outstanding quality, become not merely superior in their proper sphere, in their factual aspect, but are believed to constitute a superiority as person, and no degree of polished manners or correct behavior can turn that man into a real gentleman, a courteous person. (190-1)
Luke is especially hard on any type of mysticism that permits absent-mindedness, escapism, or vagueness. The above passage, which demands recognition of factual differences as a paradoxical prerequisite for equality, is perfectly indicative of her “marriage of heaven and earth,” her belief in incarnating spiritual wisdom in very physical ways. Any other approach would be pretense and condescension, which we feel when those who are smarter or richer or more experienced than we are try to disregard these inequalities. Similarly she refuses to accept any “wisdom” which, like Hamlet, makes us unequal to the facts of our lives: “for many [undiscerning seekers], the responsibilities and hard work of ordinary life fade and seem humdrum and unimportant. Then indeed, the end is a descent from the superhuman to the subhuman.” This is the classic type of the religious fanatic, for whom this world is of so little account. Elsewhere she speaks of a Buddhist monk who revealed his lack of enlightenment because he did not remember where he had left his umbrella.
Her essays about literature are unique because they focus primarily on the reality of the artist, rather than the fiction of the characters. Hence she looks at Othello and Iago not as two people, but as two interior realities of one man, which of course must be true, and the conflicts on the stage merely ciphers for what goes on inside. She treats the stories of the Bible similarly, which more often than not unlocks them: in particular her narrative of the life of spiritual Jacob and sensuous Esau, and sensuous Leah and spiritual Rachel, as all portions of one psyche, is representatively extraordinary.
Luke was an essayist, and her work was anthologized at several points, creating a patchwork of different collections rather than a discrete series of books. The above essays are from her book Kaleidoscope, which contains much of her best work; The Way of Woman is her most readily available collection, and it is excellent as well. But all her writings are from the same period of her life, and represent the same condensation of wisdom; some are more successful than others, but all are worth owning.
I was introduced to Luke’s writing by a wise woman of my acquaintance, whose copy of The Way of Woman I perused when I saw it on her shelf. I was astonished by it: it had been read and reread, and the various underlinings and comments, from various periods of this woman’s life, so clearly and perceptively identified major life-choices and internal crises, that I felt I could write this woman’s biography based merely on what she had reacted to in this one book. This despite the fact that I knew very few of the “consonants” of her life, and certainly none were to be found in this dog-eared paperback. This is Luke’s genius, that she expresses the great crises and conflicts, not just of hers, but of our lives: she has stripped down the externals of her own life to reveal a fundamental equality with her fellow seekers.
The intentional community she established in Wisconsin, called Apple Farm, has an interesting website which features some of her writings. Since so much of her work is about choice, and becoming more conscious of what we desire and what we are pursuing, let me put down a few of her thoughts on choice:
In our moments of choice how do we know that we are obeying the voice of truth? We can only do our best to discriminate our motives, free ourselves from conventional opinions, watch our dreams, use our intelligence, together with our intuition, weigh the values involved and the effects on other people, and then act wholeheartedly from the deepest level we know. If our choice proves to be a mistake, it will be a creative mistake – a mistake leading to consciousness. If it is a question of a big change in our lives, something almost always comes from without to meet the urge from within, and we have a chance to recognize our way – either by resisting a temptation or by accepting a new attitude. If our commitment to our “fate,” to the will of God, includes the willingness to pay the full price, we will not go astray – we will relate to the Spirit within, not succumb to possession by it. There is no rule to tell us whether this or that is the right attitude, the right way to behave in all circumstances. (262)
The Mystery of Time Continuing.
20-Aug-09I was awoken this morning at four a.m. by the howls of coyotes in the woods just on the other side of the field. They continued for some time and were answered by calls from the distant hilltops. I’m not certain why coyotes thus make their presence known across vast distances, but I suppose it serves some purpose. The cries, which were quite near, made the chipmunk who lives over the soffits in the overhang of my roof go nuts, and he scurried about in the walls making a giant fuss, as if he were trying to get out. This got the mouse who lives in the floor beneath the loft all keyed up too, and I could hear his tiny little feet padding around just a few inches from my head. After all this hullabaloo I got up and went downstairs. I stepped outside to look at the night, and saw Orion rising above Red Hill, crystal-clear in the dry air. It was the premonition of the year’s decline. I saw Perseus almost at the zenith, and though the peak of the Perseids is over, in just a few minutes I saw two meteors coming right from the warrior’s heart. Satisfied with this omen, the chipmunk, mouse, and I all went to bed.
Patterns in nature.
18-Aug-09
The holes made by a woodpecker in a yellow birch. As I’ve had some trees taken down recently, I’ve gotten to see the footprints of life made in the canopy. These holes were about 40 feet high on the tree.
Being in West Virginia at the time of my appointed court date, and confident I could put my case in writing, and certain that I would lose it, I opted for the “hearing by mail” option on my subway ticket. I got it postmarked by July 10th, which I thought was enough time to make it by the July 28th deadline. Of course it wasn’t, and I received word from the Transit Adjudication Bureau that they were adding a 50% penalty to my $50 fine because I did not respond to my ticket within 30 days. I was annoyed, as you might imagine, especially because I put my trust in the system and did not register the piece of mail. Well, the post office finally got around to returning my mail on August 9th (you can see that the second postmark, August 4th, in the photo). I presumed that my stamps, which had no indicated monetary value but merely said “First Class USA,” were good for first-class mail within the U.S. I was aware that the post office had started these “forever stamps” and frequently omitted monetary designations. I presumed a “first-class” stamp was like this. This is, unfortunately, untrue. I went to the post office to figure out this whole mess. The woman working there had no idea what the value of my stamp was. But she pulled out a big folio sheet of pictures of postage stamps without denominations, and after a few minutes we found out that my stamp was worth 39 cents. Hence I was five cents short of postage. For these five cents of inadvertence I would, in all likelihood, lose another twenty-five dollars.
Good Lord, did the Bush administration do anything right? Can anyone tell me what pressing need there is in the post office to issue stamps with defined values but no indication of their values? All it does is create more confusion and work later on. The post office has to print up, at some cost, I imagine, these big keys so that postal employees can figure out what these stamps are worth. How many wasted hours does this cause, for the system and for those who attempt to use it? There is a good reason for a “forever stamp” – a stamp with no indication of value because it has no defined value. But these stamps which are worth 39 cents, but are not labeled appropriately because of a hesitant leadership, are ridiculous.
On my ticket it specifically states that the MTA will not grant any leniency for postal delays.
I sent it off again today, and we’ll see what happens next.
Solitude and Meeting.
17-Aug-09I have written before about spending several months alone in a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. A friend asked me, “After you’ve spent so much time alone, how does that change your life when you’re not alone? Do you bring the fruits of your solitude with you down to the city?” I will attempt to answer this question in this piece.
Last year I came down to New York City from my cabin for Thanksgiving. This was my first experience of urban life in quite awhile.One day I had an afternoon snack in a café I used to frequent. Not far away from me at another table was an attractive person approximately my age and of the opposite sex, and it was fairly easy to be aware of what she was doing.
When I first entered, she had finished eating and was opening up her laptop. She then was on the computer for a short while, but not for very long, as if she had just checked her inbox, found nothing, and then got off the computer. She then took out her cellphone. After looking at it for a second, she fiddled with it – probably scrolling through names – and then made a call. No one answered apparently, and she hung up. She played with the phone again and called another person. This time she left a message. She then looked at the phone a third time, but put it back into her purse without calling anyone. She then looked around the café. The two tables next to her were each occupied by mothers with young children. The mothers were talking to each other, their babies in strollers by their tables. The young lady began making eye contact with one of the babies, making faces and smiling. The baby was briefly interested, but soon began looking back at his mother. The young lady looked around again. She pulled her phone out of her purse, looked at it one last time, then got up, took her tray to the counter, packed up her things, and left.
A year ago, I might have said this woman was looking for distraction. But I don’t think that’s quite precise enough. I’m sure she had games on her computer and cell phone, and there were newspapers at the café she could have read or in which she could have found a crossword or Su Doku. She was looking for something more specific than that.
Clearly it was a form of human contact: but it is quite possible that she could have reached the person she was trying to call and still have been searching afterward; we all know this feeling. The baby did not quite satisfy her either. There is some kind of human contact which is like food: it refreshes and sustains, and a hunger for it develops at intervals. But you could live for a month in a crowded city and never have contact of this sort.
I feel I have some kind of insight into this phenomenon, because a solitary life greatly increases the stakes in all human contact. When you drive forty minutes in order to make a phone call, or are in a social setting with friends only once or twice a month, failed social encounters – the ones where you leave even less satisfied and more alone than when you came – become positively unendurable. You think about them for a week afterwards, and wonder what went wrong. Eventually I began to consider – with the help of some books – what made for a successful meeting. Because there are times when being with another person relieves all of your loneliness, in a way that endures for days. And there are other times when being with another person makes you feel even more lonely and isolated than before. And I felt it was necessary for my own well-being not to allow the latter encounters to pile up.
The answer turned out to be very similar to the problems of the solitary life itself. When alone you learn that your deepest satisfaction comes from letting the present moment entirely fill your mind: when walking, feeling the ground under your feet, when sawing wood, watching the blade move back and forth in the kerf. When you do otherwise, you feel the light touch of insanity in your mind – that you are literally out of your senses. Your mind is so often locked up in its own patterns that it makes no room for the moment, and allows nothing in. This learned (or re-learned) discipline of total presence is the first precondition of truly meeting another person: the complete offering of yourself to the moment and the person you are encountering in that moment.
Meetings do not have to consist of deep profundities – they merely require two people to be on the same level of awareness at the same moment. Often this occurs when the moment is so extraordinary, and its meaning so manifest, that the two people cannot help but meet. One time I was playing frisbee with some friends on the Great Lawn in Central Park, when a young man asked to join us. He caught and tossed for an hour or so, then went his way. I knew nothing more of him beside his face and his first name. Three months later, I was walking through an obscure neighborhood in the western part of San Francisco, when I rounded a corner and bumped right into him. We stared dumbly at each other for a second, knowing that we knew each other but not certain how, when we recognized who we were. He had moved to San Francisco in the intervening months, and I had quit my job and biked across the United States looking for God knows what. I never saw him again. But I remember him and I am sure he remembers me as well, because of that one moment of meeting, when we both were together in wonder at the strange vagaries of fate.
City life becomes satisfying when it provides enough of these extraordinary moments of meeting with strangers. And if you are truly present to the moment, it happens often enough and sometimes produces memories whose indelibility is entirely out of proportion to the seeming significance of the event. At other times it merely refreshes and enlivens – I have sometimes shared a knowing smile with a father at the comic behavior of his children and then breezed for twenty blocks entirely satisfied with the universe.
But in most situations more is required than simply being present to the moment. While the readiness to meet is crucial, you must have in the other person the readiness to be met. The one often produces the other, but not always. Sometimes a person may be haunted by some great sorrow which they absolutely will not show you – you can feel it, but cannot unlock it. And once in conversation, words provide a thousand masks to hide behind, all of which can prevent successful meeting. As a person with an overactive brain, one of the most common types of unsuccessful conversation I have had is detailed discussion of myriad facts and ideas and opinions, the kind of conversation Ivan Ilych’s family had around him as he lay there dying, about Sarah Bernhardt’s acting or the newest interpretation of an opera, “the sort of conversation,” as the great Tolstoy says, “that is always repeated and is always the same,” despite the fact that it seems terribly original and significant to those who participate in it.
When talk seemed much cheaper in my life, I could talk about such things for hours, and since it is a habit and a pleasure, I still warm up with my friends by talking about such things. But now I know that if I want to leave satisfied, I know I must somehow find the thing that is preoccupying their thoughts more than any other thing, and see it with their eyes – the joys and sorrows that weigh most on them. And I know that I must share mine as well. Indeed sometimes it is only in such attentive conversation that through my friend’s cues I understand what is happening inside me, and vice versa. “He can save others, he cannot save himself” is for most of us the spiritual truth that makes social life so necessary.
The other great lesson I have learned in attentive conversation is that people operate on many different levels, and for meeting to occur you must divine, somehow, the level the other person is on. This requires tremendous wisdom. The young lady in the café may have been calling her friends because she was bored; in which case you can meet her by telling her a few anecdotes; or she may have been calling because she felt alone and purposeless in the universe, and your silly anecdotes will only make her feel worse. And she may use precisely the same words to indicate these two states. It is your task to figure out the meaning. Marriage is, of course, the great school of this art. Once a couple visited me in the Catskills, and I wanted to take them to the swimming hole. They had not brought bathing suits, but we all agreed that something could be improvised in so informal a place. The wife agreed but still felt insecure, and during a stop in a nearby town she purchased a bathing suit. The purchase was made quickly and under some duress, and the suit was not a perfect match for her nor very fashionable. When she emerged wearing it, she asked her husband the ever-dreaded question, “What do you think, honey?” This is where the distinction of levels and meaning is so important. This was not a question about the aesthetic value of the match of this suit and her body. She was saying, “Honey, I feel self-conscious about wearing this, and I want you to encourage me.” This is why literal honesty, which seems like such a virtue, is not: it is necessary to meet a person with the answer to the question they are really asking, not merely to the words they use. Now of course it is the responsibility of us all to learn to speak precisely, and make clear to others, using the most accurate words we can, what we are really feeling: but this is not always possible for us.
No matter how attentive you are to this meeting, it still occurs rarely, and seems to, like the Spirit, “blow where it listeth.” But you realize that it is the thing you desire above all other things, to break through to the reality of other people’s lives, and let them into yours. Solitude, besides training the mind in presence, also whets the desire for such meeting: you are willing to endure all the difficulties, because you feel how amazing and beautiful people are. As marvellous as the bears and deer are, they cannot compare to the complexity and wonder of a human being. When you are alone you think about how wonderful it would be to have a companion who really could meet you again and again, with whom you could share your daily experiences. And so you become particularly attuned to this hunger in other people: when you see it, you know that there is a possibility of engaging, even if the person is a complete stranger. When it is absent – when a person is running off somewhere, or otherwise preoccupied – you learn to interact quickly and let them run off, even if they are close friends. Not long ago I went to one of the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcasts but could not sit next to my friends, and was seated next to a woman who came alone. After the opera, I spoke briefly with her, but I was thinking of my friends and not ready to be met by a stranger; as my friends showed up and I began speaking with them, I was not at all surprised to see her take out her cellphone. She was hungry for meeting, and having failed to find it with me, she began looking elsewhere.
One other thing which solitude – which can fairly be described as long periods between meeting – offers is the possibility of real growth and development between meetings. You may have nothing to say to someone with whom you connected well just the day before: nothing new has developed in the meanwhile. Separation is a precondition of union of this sort – a separateness in which you find something of inner value.
Almost all of us seek this meeting with others, but despite its value in our eyes few have made a habit of consciously seeking it. Paradoxically I felt it was time alone which gave me both the technique and desire to connect more deeply with people.
People are everywhere flitting about trying to find this kind of meeting and union, and it is something nature prompts us toward. But many – and I surely among them – long seek it without knowing quite what they desire, or what might satisfy it. And some stay contentedly in the shallower waters, not knowing what depths are at hand for their exploration.
For more thorough explorations of these concepts, I recommend the books Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, where “meeting” is elevated to a kind of philosophy of life, and the writings of Helen Luke, especially Kaleidoscope.
The Brothers K.
18-Aug-09Even though I love the book, this made me laugh out loud. Especially the bit about Aleksey and Alyosha.