A good wine list stands in contrast to all the crazy tangents of human nature. A good wine list is beautiful and simple. The wines offered each have their own virtues of balance, finish, concentration of fruit, mineral notes and inherent qualities that make them accompany food so amazingly. Often, in ordering wine from a steward, the personality of a client comes through. "I want a big California red." Hmm, why does that not surprise me, that you would like a big fatuous foul bomb of ill-craftedness to match your ego. Rather, go with the flow. Enjoy the terrior wines of venerable tradition and local know-how.

It's like someone you have given the benefit of the doubt to for a long time. Of course, no one is completely blameless within the context of human contact and relationships big and small and passing, if only because the other individual will always be interpreting your own actions, or misinterpreting, just as you may be doing. But it's a big relief to say to yourself, you know, that which one is supposed to like really turns out to be a rather undesirable.

People will order, and taste, wines with their egos, and miss the individual grace and beauty of a wine.

"Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine." Adam Gopnik, from "What Did Jesus Do?," The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, page 74.

Jesus shared wine with publicans and sinners as a way of awakening them to that fact that these identities so clung to by habit were not, in fact, all they were, not even mainly, that secretly, or not, they were something entirely, or at least largely, different. It is the same message as the Buddha's, brought to a young West, that the notion of Self is an illusion. To all seemingly concrete conclusions about a identity, Jesus brings questioning and contradiction, revealing the riddle to any claim of Self. The wealthy are too cooked by all their assumptions of self-preservation and what-not, and will have a very hard time giving up who they see themselves to be. They'll never get to the humble Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. The poor, the sad, the mournful, are closer to the understandings which will release them, though they still have a ways to go. Caesar, well, his things are based on illusions, and if you really want to subscribe to all that, you're welcome to, but will remain mistaken. Oh, you think the harlot is solidly guilty and that you are solidly righteous enough to judge her, well, let's see if you are truly free of sin...

It's a voice that questions a lot of what a society places upon people to give them recognizable identities, radical indeed. It's reasonable to gather that an establishment might not be completely content with that.

Now what if you start asking yourself the Buddhist's questions? Hmm. Well, you have to start somewhere, and at first you may well not like some, maybe many, of your own habits. You might begin to see through things. You might begin to see yourself as something akin to a Prodigal Son, a faulted sorry self. There may come some troubling questions about your professional life, your personal life.

It could be that it isn't entirely your fault. In certain ways we live in a society that enables the tempting devils of Maya. And Buddha wouldn't be Buddha--and Jesus wouldn't be Jesus--if there weren't a susceptibility on the part of the human creature to, as lower animals, respond to stimuli, even stimuli made up in one's own head of a tempting sort. The two are monumental thinkers for good reason; their insights are brilliant, maybe even testable, of a high sort, with great powers known and unknown, a whole new way of looking at things, in deep agreement with the nature of reality. And maybe they provide stuff we, in our busy lives, don't get to sort out so forcefully.

Jesus' confrontation with the ego's fascination with wiles is rendered as a personal encounter with a personified Satan he will say no to. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of 'personal encounters,' voices, clear signs from the God of Abraham. (Later on, we'll get the Mormons' personal messages from archangels.) Buddha, in some contrast, is more about drawing such epiphanies out through careful thought, logic, meditation, stuff one does on his own, free to all for the taking.

You might find yourself feeling a bit naked, like you're nothing but a sad person after a life of asking yourself questions, but a life of falling into the same old habits, if still having been capable of treating other folks with friendliness, kindness, hopefully some decency. And you are at least free now from being little more than just entirely a publican, a sinner, a lowly fisherman living humbly at the edge of a great busy empire.

It comes as a sense of footing, the right kind, to allude to a parable of Jesus, at times an uneasy place for the worldly to inhabit, maybe a rather lonely one, but a healthy, psychologically sound and independent one. For what it's worth, essential now as then for negotiating life.

There seems to be a sense of entitlement to some people that matches the importance they attribute to their role in society. Which came first? Good for them. They perform important roles in society. I simply make an observation on behavior based on serving people dinner, wine and drinks. I might guess that one could have observed such an attitude from very early on. Where does it come from? Is it genetic? Is it an attitude picked up on as a babe? Is it some form of actions of past lives causing an effect according to karmic law?

There are also those who don't mind serving people, who enjoy it. And I have great respect for such people. They strike me as being on a run of good karma. Some serve humanity in grand and important ways, and for some it's just simpler, more direct.

It is the right of all sentient beings to grasp and to understand and to share as a lesson to others the sense of karma. This is the compassion, to share the understanding of how past deeds shape a person's life.

Amazon and CreateSpace have answered a call. Now those books which people write out of compassion, with no wish for gain, are finally easily and broadly available. Where I once had vague thoughts that some democratic institution should arise to serve better the plain truths of sentient beings, the marketplace has developed such a vehicle. Bravo to all who make it work, including those who write the many things they do out of excellent intentions.

The history of people cannot be told without the story of governing systems. A government has philosophical underpinnings, important thoughts not to be underestimated. This is why we all enjoy a little Locke sometimes, that sort of stuff. An important part of our schooling is all about that, making thoughtful young citizens who agree to work together. The notion that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights works as well as it does because it agrees with our reality. Don't mess with my freedom and my privacy and I'm happy not to mess with yours, beautiful and simple. Democracy is simply the proper diet for humanity, tyrannies and totalitarianism being unhealthy.

Democracy agrees with Buddhist thought. Any self which would impose itself upon another is based on illusion. The only reality to the self, in a sense, is its freedom, which cannot be expressed in tangible terms. Democracy stands as a strong system of government for its foundations in reality.

Kerouac is a hit in democratic regions of the world because he is true. "Hateful ole' Duluoz me," constantly fallible, but sensitive and always wising up. He's a real American, going through illusions, thoughtful of making his way out from under them to breath in the fresh air of freedom.

We tend to find out who we are largely through finding out who we are not, discovering ourselves through a negative, for that which is outside of us. The necessary experimentation is a shy habit, and thinkers aren't fond of an intrusive police state for reasons of the constant perhaps even habitual errors made in self-discovery. Even our daily tasks, ingrained as they may be, have the potential still to strike us as being rather odd and arbitrary, at least a matter of setting into patterns that seem to work for us, a day to do laundry, a day to grocery shop. We want to be teachers, but become aware that we know less and less, that we learn through being wrong, that being our way to find the peaceful being we subscribe to.

Back to Brel

Brel, to the popular consumer, has the advantage of being able to put his Buddhist-related takes on life into swell music and theatrical performance. It strikes me the writer, with his humdrum tale, is at a disadvantage, maybe more so if his 'sad' story comes at particularly angst-ridden times. But, if his focus is keen, and if he can ignore such conditions, his quiet take on a simple life that addresses the basic issues of constant change, suffering, etc., has a potential for great energy like the atom. He must offer his plain story, one that might even be honestly regarded as dull and boring (not meant for the market's sensational tastes), as a vehicle of some small enlightenment that might add to others and grow into something.

The greater or more common the observed fault of falling for the illusory, the foolishness, the 'how could I have been so vain and stupid to have fallen for that,' the greater the potential energy the moment of literature has, for exciting other molecules of human kind to do good and circumspect things. But, in the meantime, the moment of literature itself sits waiting nakedly and pathetically. Certain times will heap more ridicule upon it, trying to bury an important discovery with further excesses of its own vanity.

First, the writer, or a Brel, must approach his own sins.

There's that funny letter Lincoln wrote, to Speed's mom, about a woman he'd thought about asking to marry, about how coming back to her after being away he wasn't so sure, of how she didn't want to marry him anyway. It's an admission of something with a potential for no small embarrassment, and magnanimously, with humor, he embraced, owned, as we say now, the story. And yes, it really happened, the whole thing. (Lincoln did things live, not holding back, not afraid terribly of screwing up, no small amount of his beauty. Eventually like a living Keats poem.)

It's one of those rare but beautiful moments in American literature where one looks at himself and sees human failings, observes how those play out, and how one lives on, hopeful of being a decent person.

Desolation Angels

It's a deceptively masterful opening, one any writer, laboring over notebooks, would recognize. "Hateful ol' Duluoz me," he calls himself. He remembers childhood. He takes us up to where he is now. Lyrical words, riffs on Hozomeen, the mountain where he is a fire lookout. The opening is proof to me that any writer doing his scales will come up with something good, a shape that is deeply recognizable, as if out of some pattern not exactly the same but akin to the patterns found in holy writings, here more individual, human, prayerful, confessional than a laying down of the law. It's a way we wake up to many a day.

We know Kerouac did his scales. Here, as in other places, the fruits of his labor, complicated, complex, worth reading as anything.