Still, Chekhov, given all his accomplishments and doctorly professionalism, is wishful, wistful.  The great sketch of the lost dog, from her perspective, "Kashtanka."  (She leaves the side of her master, led astray by new and different smells and sights. Wandering into a friendly person, who runs a circus she will perform in.  The goose, the cat.  The interpretation of animal language.)  The writer at his simplest best, a fable, a dog's experience of lostness, the dying goose, the nervous cat.

Like the great long short story "The Steppe," it's a story that opens doors to the deepest of human feelings through conditions that are almost abstract.  It's writing that makes a Platonov story possible.( Carver as well follows the example.)  One of those stories that almost says out loud, "cheer up, my friend;  everyone's life has suffering."

Moby Dick having a similar fable quality...  Ahab's scar...

A writer speaking from personal experience...



Thoughts, mental masturbations after a long shift, no busboy, Mr. T the tittering bon vivant staying late savoring his digestif after his cheese plate.  The handsome young waiter, J, after being very helpful, after getting Mr. T settled, after helping me get the last few desserts out to that other late table, leaves with his girlfriend, a perfect classic beauty.  (He's young and won't mess it up.)  "They are a lovely couple," Mr. T remarks.  Last visit, as he sang loudly "God, I know I'm one" to the Animals "House of the Rising Sun," he proclaims us the makings of a good "wrinkle bar."  This one, as everyone seems to know each other, we're like a small town Veterans of Foreign Wars.  He's amused enough singing along to Bob Dylan as he sniffs his snifter with one nostril closed by a finger, making do with a Balvenie 15 year old.  Toward the end he can see I'm finally a bit pissed off having to drag the last few dirty plates downstairs, just want to be left alone to eat a bowl of brown rice.  He apologizes for keeping me late, seeing I've about had it and would like to hurl something against the wall, and when I grumble, "no busboy," he makes relieved reference to the classic psychology of him being for a moment a bit "it's all about me." He leaves and I do some stocking for the big Bastille Day private party, Condrieu, Meursault, Clos Vougeot, Cotes Du Nuit (which I end up leaving down in the cave where it's cool, not 80 degrees as it is during the summertime upstairs.)  Pandora is playing the Leonard Cohen station, and even he and his station, one is left with the insipid nature of pop music, childish, meant to excite the emotions, failing to relieve muscular tension, eating up years of brain power if you let it be the soundtrack.

A few glasses of wine while riding the bike on the stand in front of the television, the Tour going through the Vosges, turn in without even showering.

Today Contador abandons in the mists of the Vosges with a knee injury, the frame of his Specialized breaking as he climbed a pass.

People remind me sometimes of the precocious schoolboy Kolya from The Brothers Karamazov.  Smart, quick, a natural born leader.  He is engaged in schoolboy tricks and clever guises.  He's almost wise, sounding gifted beyond his years as far as any discussion.   He expresses an opinion, a sophisticated argument:  "Art is mental masturbation."  An interesting observation, no doubt.  But yet there is something missing, that needs to be brought out in him.  (In all of us, really, and this is not just Dostoevsky's point.)  Of course, Alyosha, the youngest brother, is the man for the job, and he takes the schoolboys as a group and educates them very subtly in a spiritual lesson.

And so are people, being precocious, impressed by unimpressive things.  Yes, pessimism is natural during the shaky times of a person's development.  Easy to lose faith, no doubt.  Easy to not believe in the higher aspect of love in its own form, easy to want to attend to all the practical things first, as if one could without a higher guidance.  I've felt hurt too, and took it out on myself by lacking faith in many a good thing about me, acting out, as it were.

And so we learn our lessons, learn to avoid the quick pleasure, the satisfaction even of making a buck, because that's not what it's all about.

Every day, some vigilance is required, for me to take the bike ride, to do the yoga, to walk to work, to avoid the easy pleasure.  And maybe, like the always say, maybe embarrassingly, is that a good spiritual practice comes through helping others.

Yesterday afternoon, the phone call from the boss.  Come help out, be ambassador of the restaurant at the Bastille Day event at the French Embassy, serving braised veal cheeks osso bucco style.  "Well, okay," I say, agreeably enough.  "It will only be a few hours."

I end up staying after we pack up our steam table trays.  A good Buddhist day interrupted, falling into the mire of a Fellini scene, Big Band, singer in red dress, diplomats, well-dressed Washington people.  I make my rounds through the restaurant people who've set up representative servings on long tables.  Across from us, Cafe Du Parc.  Over there, Ris.  Next to us Chez Billy.  I end up talking to a nice lady from the Vendee presiding over a well celebrated head cheese  and who knows pretty much everyone in the business, Jean Louis, Boulud...  and she's kind enough to chat with me.  All the while, of course, a little wine, a taste of Eole Provence red, two reds from Morocco near the Atlas Mountains, a Merlot from the D'Oc, a couple glasses of Cotes Du Rhone, drinking like I do in such situations to make up for lost time, a release from the strange discomfort of being in such an aimless business as serving people when they come by.

I get a ride home from my bro back at the restaurant as I've left my keys there in my courier bag.


The mind changes.  Yesterday's problems recede.  Things shift, move on, do not stay fixed.  A new set of problems, a change of emotional reactions, new day.

At a certain point you need to give yourself a break and be positive.  Your intentions were good.  Execution might have failed miserably, but your heart was in the right place.  Buddhists get a bad wrap in relationships and pretty much everything else, accused of non-action.

The main action in our lives is that we were created as who we are.  We don't have to change anything about ourselves, but develop into the higher being we're meant to be, a part of the clear consciousness.  It's too easy to become obsessed with the obvious things, to not explore the depths of karma.

How do you speak to a world so certain of itself, the world of military versus terrorist strike, feuding nations, the grab for resources, the competition considered over basic human decency.

You meditate, and your world slowly and steadily improves.  You begin to do things more in accordance with yourself, being more in control of your emotions.  You live a cleaner more organized life;  you address things more directly, more as you should given the totality of your being;  you stop lying and doing the counterproductive things.  Initially, this takes great concentration.  Maybe that's why some of us come across that through the sense of things not going right and being down and beaten.

But it's all confusing, a long process of education, to not be drawn into an issue as other people see it from the usual worldly perspective of seeking comfort and an absence of pain, the craving that follows from a consciousness hypnotized by the illusion of a concrete self.

Love has to be approached, in the purely Buddhist sense, of a uniting with the larger, with the correspondent part of creation, with a fuller realization of karma.  And this takes morality, which may be how some political figures achieve a truer stature, through the taking up of a moral issue, becoming a deeper expression of themselves, just as a writer, a novelist like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy might through the lush and non-judgmental worlds of their fiction and accounts of humanity.

It makes you wonder, were we born with the enlightened knowledge of who we should be, that by needs we should fall and fail before picking up again, in our maturity believing in the higher purpose and working to manifest it in our own little way?   Is that how focus comes?

What then of the things we've missed, of the opportunities we did not seize?  How would Buddha tell us to think about these things?

Is this why the rules of courtship, of how to behave in society are found to be irksome to some of us? Some can connect A to B, quite simply, then see if it works out, and then some of us are in a point of exploring the depths of one's own karma and the way to the betterment determined from within.

The spell of a first romantic meeting broken by the distracting call of a family visit, to be seen as the interference that caused everything to go wrong, or somehow the call of karma, of making amends for a previous life's shortcomings, or did that visit then create new ills through the bad choice of not getting back to the romance as soon as one possibly could?  Difficult to account for simply and cleanly, I think anyway, just as a Chekhov story is complicated, though, I admit, often a tale of the thwarted, like the shy soldier who gets a kiss in the dark.  Is that thwarted quality itself part and parcel of the tender Buddhist message that ultimately unites us all, as if like a Sherwood Anderson story in which people are finally reunited after much woe to cry and keep each other tender company after too many years gone by.

It's not easy to find and follow one's karma and the dharma.  There is much distraction to be avoided, and we have to learn this the hard way.

You can't help thinking of early scientists, gentle educated people who pursued new schema, building on a way of thought.  Liberal arts, as often said, is about learning how to think and how to learn and how to study.

They don't always have an easy go of it.  Einstein was a clerk, "a certified ink pisser," as he did his math (aided by his wife.)  Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton...  The same could be applied to the scientists of the literary art sort, Dickens, Hardy, those who map the worthy desires and hidden stuff, the pains and joys, the clarity and confusion of the mind.  A poet can indeed bring a sudden broader understanding to the science of the day, through careful thought, through intuition, through spiritual practice.  Such that the Buddhist can be presented with modern Quantum Theory or the concept of the vastness of the Universe, and nod, "oh, yes, we've understood that for a long time, in our own terms of mind and subtle mind, time, structure, worlds, if you care to listen."

There are hardships, it seems, when you come up with a shift of paradigm as to what might better present reality.  It's a pleasant endurance sport, one that bequeaths great satisfaction, I would imagine.  It would present a dignity of correction.

I suppose as a young scientist of my own sort--using the term quite loosely--it occurred to me, selfishly, one might argue, to find inspiration through the kind of beautiful young woman you'd want to, as a young man, bring flowers to.  That might have seemed to me as good a way as any to explore the deeper reality. You didn't necessarily have to do it in a world falling apart like in Jesus' time.

But it would still call from you a kind of personalization of the study, as if you had to live an experiment, a kind of A Tale of Two Cities sort of a thing if you had to make a rough drawing, maybe more recently Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, related to the original Shakespeare, acts of literature, in some ways fanciful, created by the mind, but inspired by a deeper truth.

Some people feel they have to make war and conquer stuff to gain love.  To which you might say, they probably were mistreated as a child.  But that's fighting it, when you need to be passive, turning the other cheek.  (Republicans--never got enough love as children.)

As a bartender I've seen a whole long parade of strutting and boasting, a strange vision of people about how they might get what they think they want.    It could be unbearable to watch sometimes, the big ego of an older man, leaning in over a young lady, 'what's your story,' the playing of a numbers game, or a million "How To Pick Up Chicks."  Stomach turning stuff.  Such that I would not even want to write about it.  "Please, please, please be subtle;  please be gentle, please be cool," a voice aching inside would say, while I had to go on with my chores even if I too might want to respond with an overture of friendliness.  I was always, from the start, very professional about my role as bartender.  And sometimes it would hurt, particularly knowing that I would be going home to no one.  And I went through years and years, feeling completely invisible, or taken as a juvenile, patted on the head as a decent person, and even told that I must be gay and dismissed by a female with certainty to her mind.  That is pain, and maybe we all know what I'm talking about.  No way to fight your way out of it, and you just carry on with work, go home, watch TV, beat off to Hairy Erotica to keep the plumbing in order, and really wishing for high Tantric sex with an understanding beautiful soul.

But you may well end up feeling obscure as a scientist, feel the strangeness of holding down a job really in many ways far beneath you given your breadth, wisdom, knowledge, background and stature.

Bad things did happen to some of these scientists, particularly those who went against the enfranchised Church.  More egoless people who might walk through the woods and pick a flower were burnt at the stake for being witches.

Obviously it hurts being treated like an idiot and all the worse things.  But you cannot relent, cannot renounce, cannot ever quit the calling of your own science.

(To continue on with post family vacation thoughts...)  The highest form of love, the reason why we're here, the mark of a real human being, is to help with the realization that life is suffering, always a dissatisfactory quality to the moment if you think about it.  If you can show that a relationship bears the same thing, that there is always some suffering to life, then I think you're being real.  (And maybe that's the beauty of sex, done properly.)

I think of Platonov's short story "Amongst Animals and Plants," the simple tale of a railroad worker that begins with him walking in the forest, somewhere far away from important people, except those who whiz by on a train sipping something pink and sparkling.  Insignificant everyday creatures, a rabbit playing in its litter.   To my reading, this is a great and final portrait of a writer, a kind of insignificant idiot, a worker at some pedestrian thing as far as the sense of making money in the world.  Through a knee-reaction, thinking of the well-being of others, the character of the story acts.

In a country steeped in reality, Russia, let's say, for the sake of argument, given the general origin of Platonov, to write about such a person in such a way has value, literary importance, acceptance as a form of teaching which deserves serious attention and respect, even if the writer is never going to be rich from the duties of his caste in life.

In a less real place, who would bother with such a story about an insignificant person, plain as a growth of moss on a log, who does something of a significance beyond himself.  Platonov's characters, many of whom can barely bare a relationship, are real;  they speak of the universal unsatisfactory quality of existence in a way the people on the train, living a higher life, favored by the party, cannot yet appreciate, as if distracted.

It would be no surprise to me if a real writer were an insignificant person, almost an idiot, who works at a job so utterly mundane that people would wonder what happened to him.

If you want to test your Buddhist meditation practice, it is said, go take a family vacation.  Nervous automobile passenger mother, overbearing highly successful and organized brother and his wife and little kids, sister in law's parents...  I found a point of beach where the sand was flat, two graceful curves of beach to either side, some small boats to the side, piping plovers doing their tiny footed work at the tide's seaweed strewn edge, I did my yoga routine, headstand in the breeze, and then, in lotus, I meditated.  And somehow, this miserable bachelor was able to get through it, able to persevere through the deep sting of lonesome feelings being surrounded by capable families with beautiful kids and beach houses up on the Maine Coast.

Funny things will go through your mind in such a situation, and as the mind is not at all a fixed thing, ever changing, the sea of the mind and its memories through an infinite amount at itself.  Largely, memories of just about the stupidest most utterly self-defeating actions a young man with his heart set on another person could do, a whole history of them, and then, following on that, the further history of a miserable life, worse and sadder and more disturbing than Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca.  Far less successful.  Stinging pain swept by the waves, extending out to the horizon, following you wherever you go, thoughts of the most calumnious foolishness in all creation, as if one wanted to be self-defeating, to, as they say, snatch defeat from the jaws of beautiful victory.

Which is, by the way, the basic story of Scrooge in Dickens' Tale.

So, anyway, what can you do, really, but offer yourself some meditation.  None of it was ever mean-spirited, and maybe the fact that comes out of it all finally is that you really loved someone, enough to be defenseless around her.  Put your faults aside, the lack of any and all proactive measures besides a very few, the obscenely horrible cruel failure to see one's place within a predictable setting of courtship between two of opposite sex...  Put that aside to the extent possible, because you have to go onward and you have to live life.


And yet, perhaps the strangest or most striking realization that came out of the seaside invisible hurricane of huge scale within was that the love, yes, that's the word, the love for this person was still there.  In fact it hadn't changed one bit.  It had a tangible physical presence, a field of energy, as real as anything.  It existed.  It was close the core of reality and all its mysteries. It had been lit, during a special meeting, and it had rather flourished, privately, quite well.  One felt no need to actively do anything about it, part of its quality and laws.  It's presence was enough to reassure any person feeling such that the whole world and all beyond it and everything really is built upon, a manifestation, of love.  Unimportant stuff slipped away.  Yes, one could say, "well, but nothing ever came of it," which might be true, but on the other hand, at least I learned something, sensed something worth putting into terms even as it seemed out beyond any formable duality of common verbal logical understanding.

(And looking at the length of a person's life and all they go through and the lonesome times they will go through without a firm sense of meaning in life and all the trudging it seemed, contrary to some common sense, actually healthy.  It was as if one had discovered something of the Old World, an organic creation shepherded and crafted, useful and practical, something that would in fact never go out of a style or use in the human world.)

"Well, why the hell didn't you act on it?!!" the mind vocalizes at you.  To which you, in attempt to retain control, to not let the mind go back to the lobby of a college dining hall twenty seven years ago, respond, "meditate, meditate, picture Buddha, do not judge, learn from it..." as best as you can.

And that's the thing, that love doesn't go anywhere, but remains the principle reality of daily existence, even if you're completely mum about it.  Even if to many people's sane mind's estimation, you had descended into... well, what would you call it... poor psychological health, stalking, delusions, etc.  And for this writer, and probably any other, the truth is what you're after, rather as if you were pursuing science in a laboratory.  Hemingway wrote standing up.  I'm working at it sitting on the floor like I was warming up for yoga.  Spine straight.  Chin up.  Breath in; breath out.  Daily pressing chores aside for the time being.  Drinking my tea.  After waking up in a fairly miserable state, "oh fuck here I am back in hot old stinky DC," my Buddhist town, stiff from driving Route 81 through Pennsylvania's mountains and valleys alongside eighteen wheelers on their own paths...

My mother's words, suggesting, are in my frontal mind, "you know so much about health and this blood type diet stuff, why don't you write a book about that, to put it into accessible terms, so that all those obese people you see in the supermarket, fat young kids already ruining their lives, make better choices..."

Indeed, the main image of Christianity comes to mind:  "This is my blood... my body;"  the three dimensional aspect of the Cross (as if it were a cube, a three-dimensional figure, cut upon and laid flat onto a two dimensional surface);  the aspect of being nailed to it, us, the personality, the suffering mind, however you should think about it.  Yes, I would agree.  Blood Type is one of those things that bears out our own individual manifestations.  Blood Type, your basic genetic structure of atoms, determines who you are, how you act, how you respond, how you think, what you will suffer from, what you should allow into your body to enjoy good health.  And I think people underestimate this animal aspect of our personal identity.  We aren't all cookie cutter cut out obviously.  And I might have more physically in common with the Asian or the African person I pass in the street than my own brother, if he is of a different blood type (thus a necessary aspect in the choice in blood or organ donation.)

My father, speaking intuitively, was an organized man.  He had broad cheek bones and had Type B blood.  (Which my brother inherited, and basically displaying the same sort of thought out accomplishment.)  But it was the Blood Type of my mother, O, which I received.  Being acquainted with the deepest aspect of his teaching, his profession, I was basically taught to first and foremost be a kind of Buddhist, or a Theosophist, having some basic drive, that is, to understand all things by thinking, by seeing them through deeper understandings, their individual guises falling away to speak of That Which Is.  He wrote once in a letter to me how this was my luck of the draw, to have such an old man who thought of such things, such that not many people he would or could converse with about say the repeated manifestations in the time bound world of the wise person, Moses, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, etc.

And maybe, on one level, such lessons are better meant for a practical B, omnivorous survivor descended from the hordes off the Mongol plains who raped every woman they came across as they spread West rather, rather than the older O type person who has to more carefully watch himself in a modern dietary world, who has a propensity for language such that he has to do something verbal to keep control of it, lest his chemistry tip from Joycean clarity into schizophrenia, depression, anger, gloom, and so on.  If an O took up such teachings, he would tend to take them seriously, as he would have to take aerobic exercise seriously, as he would have to avoid, seriously, acidic things like hard alcohol, maybe alcohol in general, wheat, potatoes, a lot of dairy foods...  He would learn things on a gut level, testing them to for truth the only way he knew how, which is to live the great experiment.

Whatever an O might have to say at the end of it all, maybe that would be wise, who knows.  (Perhaps, like Hemingway, or Joyce--Type Os, I suspect--he would leave a record of his experiments and experiences, for others, as they tend to do, to interpret.)  What would he have found out after passing through all the shame and mistakes and the passing up, the failure, of a family life, of a career shaped with some common sense and familial input, with some regard for security?

Perhaps he would find that stuff which is wrote about through inklings, the stuff of Paul, the long suffering and unselfish quality of the Corinthian interpretation of that word and what we might mean by it, and how we might better feel it, better understand it, "love."  Love doesn't go anywhere.  It is passive.  It is deep.  You meditate to find a way to be in tune with it, the force behind all things, a force you cannot go against, but only with.

That seemed to be the ends of the reflection, spurred on by meditating by the sea amidst a personal cloud of some distressing realizations concerning my failure to act.  I began to see that love itself, love too, is Buddhist, that it need not be denied, forsaken as a agent of further suffering, abandoned through an act of willpower.  Love existed, a physical presence, as real and tangible as the sky above or the general fact of trees.  And maybe the general facts humanity has figured out, that everything exists as a field of atoms and energy revealed by light too became more ethereal in the presence of its power.

Then the little misunderstandings, the awkwardness, the messing things up without ever intending to as if some bizarre will had taken control perfectly against one's own will, all of that receded, for which I was very grateful, even if the suspicion of rationalizing everything floated about.  This is why there are love stories, because the depth of the matter is something we are tasked with figuring out.  Some of us maybe with more thought than others, some with what seems as comparatively more action.

For me, to figure out the deep agreement between Buddhist tenant and the love that comes to us over a stranger, a special person not from your own family, was a great relief, a means to eliminate a deep rutted practice of self-laceration when the backsliding habits were in play, and they were fairly ruthless. Perhaps this is what is meant by the parable of the House Divided.  You can not get away forever with being selfish.

Any such discussion would have to address the things that occupy us on a daily basis, the practical measures of a place in society, rent money, responsible behavior, job, career, child care, food on the table.  It follows that in feeling down about yourself you might not be as good at positively working toward such things.  There are vicious cycles, vicious circles.  How to get out of them but by being positive somewhere within.  One way to do that is following intuitions toward deeper understandings that go beyond pettiness.




Maybe, she too, I imagine, was, is, an O type blood person, with the verbal dexterity, the gift for physical comedy, the need for calm to which my intrusions were an upsetting thing, but also speaking of the gift of our immune systems basically liking each other, of finding ourselves basically different halves of the same creature, in need of uniting.

And every time I listened to the deeper self, did something bold like gently bringing her flowers at the end of the school year, I was doing something right, even if it initially upset her.  And every time I tried to listen, to figure out, to go into the complicated maze of society-based thought, I was completely stymied and made great mistakes.  I remember fondly the things I did based on the deeper stuff, even as I was shouted at as if to send me off forever into the fog.  And I always had my father's deeper lessons to take refuge in, and she would take to liking me again soon enough, even after all my foolish inept just plain stupid cowardly behavior, and I would feel very good.

I would forget about it all, if I could.  But that's not how things, ultimately emanating out of the love principal, the love supreme, work.

Dear reader, learn from my mistakes.  (Hemingway, a fiction writer, not necessarily a perfect Buddhist, wrote about the cowardliness of others, the physical shaking of bullfighter's legs betraying their role, but one might better write about one's own.)