A Love Supreme.  John Coltrane becoming spiritual, no more with the heroin, with the drink, with the buttons pushed, no more with accepting the triggers, but finding health instead, peace and Buddha calm, the last years of his life, serene, different.  Part of the music legend.  A transcendent piece of music;  like me, almost fifty years old.

I call my mom to help sort it all out.  I was thinking about getting out of DC for a cheap vacation in my old hometown, where I went to college.  But it's a long train ride, and it's not my reunion year anyway, having gone to my twenty-fifth two years ago.  I'm going to relax, and enjoy a day off from work, and think about camping trips and getting outfitted for hikes.  REI seems to be a satisfying materialistic outlet.

We talk about meditation, as a way to get through the bad thoughts that crop up.  "I watch the lake, the clouds, the birds...  I learned to get the bad thoughts go."  That's why I meditate.  Through the practice of clearing the mind, I don't get bothered by the past.  I deal with what I can.  I live, or try to, as healthily as I can.  Live in the moment, go for a walk in the woods in the rain.  Sit by the stream on an old fallen tree trunk.  Walk home, a little less fun, out on the sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue against rush hour traffic.   Do some yoga at some point.  Later treat yourself to carry out Chinese.

It's good not to be provoked, to not fall into reacting.  But it's a decision, and decisions are often hard.  Cheap vacation or no?  Would be nice to get out of town... Go rub elbows with old friends, or just take care of yourself, nurse a stiff neck, a tired frame.  Admit to not feeling so self-satisfied as to go and paint a cheery picture of adult success and jobs that do more than pay the rent, something you can stomach.  Not wanting to go down the path of 'hey, wine guy... '  Like Coltrane, not wanting to be part of the part, not a part of it anyway.  Who can you talk about a love supreme without sounding off in left field anyway?  And maybe you need a belief in that, or in the Dharma, or some form of peace that might not seem a part of normal logic or the normal successful path.

I take refuge in writing.  I don't always get it from a social setting, from the crowds.  Individuals within, yes, but crowds doing something, no.  You have to realize you're an artist, doing something an artist does, which is more ignoring the social setting's self-congratulatory group behavior.  And maybe that's just because of being a different kind of person.

Peace is a habit you slip into, no longer feeling it improper or unearned.   Boring, perhaps it feels sometimes.  But oddly enough, some support for that, lately, the wrier George Saunders on Charlie Rose asked to talk largely not so much about his writing but about his commencement speech at Syracuse a few years ago, and that of his friend's, both his and Foster Wallace's bringing up the Buddhist's understandings that relate to a firm fixed self, the distance from that illusion through thought and kindness, compassion for other sentient beings.  Commencement speeches... advice, guidance, thoughts from writers who've stared at the problems of existence... mentioning kindness.

I like this form.  It's quick, it's a sketch, it doesn't burden anyone with over ambition, a loss of message due to too much ego-identification with the process or result.  Thoughts are caught quickly in transitory form, like ripples left by the tide on a beach with kelp and seaweed and remains of things.

Dostoevsky reached for a form, after the years of practicing his amateur brilliant craft.  You have The Idiot, Prince Myshkin the epileptic with the femme fatal and the money guy, you have to have Notes from the House of the Dead for its journal experiences, you have to have the one with the horse head dream, before you get to the sublime story of true teachers, craftily deposited in the serial murder yarn of Karamazov, that is his pinnacle, that closing scene of Alyosha and schoolboys, and a small but happy vulnerable but strong 'hurrah,' that is also the story by a writer who knows that he is dying.

In a pure sense, worth entertaining as a deeper thought, I wonder if my father considered much of the modern academy fairly bankrupt as far as meeting the duties of the cleric, the educator.  Selfish careerism, the cagey politics catering to the business end of the animal...  In a way the last thing you'd want to criticize about society, the vulnerable people who do the job of teaching at the higher level.

It was as if my father could wipe out all the little differences and distinctions we make on the worldly level, to sweep away nationality and worldly purpose, for all the sciences and the sciences that are humanistic and even poetic to be taught for their original purposes of having other people learn what there is.

He belonged to a mystical realm as much as that of his employer.  He would teach, on anything that came across his mind, really, though, ostensibly, his subject was botany, or the societal use of plants.

Memorial Day Eve.  Slow.  8:45, server V, working downstairs, lets me know, gleefully, as I run downstairs for something, to say hi to the Holmgrens maybe, "Tim, Tim," imitating the famous Mr. Tap, who has my name wrong.  He's a legend of bon vivant cosmology.  He has a fur coat of every kind, and when he came once with a waist length mink coat one late fall, the conservative Sunday night customers of Bistrot of the Dying Gaul downstairs dining room turned and almost sneered.  Which didn't faze him.  Sometimes he might get a little close to being a bit happy lets say.  He has a good cocktail, he has some champagne, he orders a three course meal, he has maybe a half bottle of Bordeaux, then an espresso series, along with a digestif.  V. is happy, as she's almost done, fall on the ball, let the clock tick away, she's going home soon anyway.  And the famous Mister Tap is going to be eating upstairs with "Tim," a name I will readily respond to when called over.  And Mr. Tap will be with me 'til midnight at least.

But Jesus Christ, it's been a slow slow night, and now, fuck, we all just want to go home.  As Mr. Tap is sat, V brings up 3 new customers--almost 9 by now, kitchen closing in half an hour, to look over and see what dining room they might be comfortable in.  She tries to sell them on the beauty of eating with me, upstairs, with no busboy.   They sit at a couch, it doesn't fit them.  They decide to sit downstairs.  They'll end up lingering at the front table by the window, but V doesn't have to close anyway.

Mr. Tap calls me over, Tim...  He's had a cocktail with bartender so n so at La Plume chic restaurant in fancy hotel, drink called a red devil, takes muddling, ingredient special blend...  Mr. Tap, as you know, I'm not up to date with all those hipster time consuming craft cocktails.  (This is a bistrot.  You have to do things fast here, everything all at once.  Slow craft cocktails just aren't part of a realistic approach to service, wham bam thank you ma'am.)  You know I'm a classicist here.  I like to keep things simple and clean.  Maybe... a sidecar?  Oh!  Oh!!  Wonderful.  Wonderful, Tim!  That's exactly what I was thinking of.  By now he's not so nervous as he was earlier.  He was cut off, and/or given a lecture about by the boss, laying ground rules about what he might drink if he is going to have a bottle of wine, that sort of thing.  The man's been a partier for a long time, and it seems he likes to throw in a little medication, ambien or something, into the blend of his buzz.  I've had to carry him to the men's room before, where it seemed he reclined on the floor to relax for a while.

I bring over a fresh lemon muddled sugar rimmed beauty of sidecar, made with cognac and cointreau, the rim sugared, to his specs.   "Oww!  Tim,  Oww!  Thank you."  Mr. Tap is happy.

My father, a scientist, was not a facile thinker.  And so he kept wordless understandings about things beyond our terms and yet somehow within the reach of experience and the heart's insight.  It was appropriate that he studied nature, plant biology.  It was appropriate that his mentor was a Theosophist, and that he kept around books about Zen  Buddhism and the like.

Writing a book is never a facile experience, and nor should the critique of one be.  Inner vision, vision beyond words, is the only guide.    A text emerges in accordance with the intent.  A critique might offer, as in the case of the Kirkus Indie review of A Hero For Our Time, the thought--to use an example--that the character of 'the Princess' is not well drawn, doesn't venture beyond an opaque portrait.  Well, people, being part of the Universe, aren't always that knowable.  Only through meditation, entering into nonverbal mind of non judgment, can one truly see them as they are, which is never to be facilely put into terms.  Thus opaque.  It is part of the same ultimate truth that if one even ventures to draw himself as a defined character in a social understanding attached to the verbal (rather than the depth of reality), or even ventures or fancies to be a particular sort of individual, then he has most likely lost the thread of truth and proper portrayal and real understanding, as such things are beyond the dualist nature of verbal thought.  The Kirkus critique also tripped over the deeper discussion between character and father about the purpose of education, suggesting that education is merely job training, but that's another topic.

If the writing of a book entails a deeper effort to understand the nature of a human character, or 'the human character,' I think certain conclusions are drawn.  Writing a real book as an effect upon those who enter into the duty.  And so are they changed, stripped away of facile self-image.  So they must remain untouched by the great bulk of societal understandings of them, by the terms.

Following the logic, properly, the writer must approach the great task of meditation, leaving behind dualistic understandings, and so there's a good chance the writer will eventually find peace, a peace he might find deep and interesting, moving, requiring no falseness, no cliché.

Perhaps this is why people, and writers, retreat into nature, and there find company with their friends, creatures, natural life, who stand in the same wordless understanding, as the manifestation of the same deeper reality.  The unknowable quality of persons is therefore to be respected in the writing of works that truly reflect experience.

And if not, then you're writing a book merely for entertainment purposes, hopefully careful not to damage humanity any more than it already is by thoughtless effort.


The matter lies in the vision, that which the writer brings out of the wordless, out of non verbal understanding, out of that steady background his deeper personality is attached to.

Is it related to the vision that a backsliding in one area, or in one act, leads to others, a chain of events that needs recovery from.

The National Memorial Day Concert...

The stories, the narration, the visitations, the choreography, the stars, the hoopla, the singing, the appearances of General Powell, a narration preying upon emotions, words of 'family,' pride, prayer, remind one of that basic kernel of All Quiet on the Western Front.  Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori.  And one is not faulting the people who are the victims, brave, of the world of conflict, the wars one nation feels obliged, out of PR, and identity, to enter into or start or feel obliged to begin.  Pop artists sing pretty, and patriotically, as if death could be soothed by a tuneful voice in the shape of a star who fits an archetype role related to a dead or injured soldier.

Enemy fighters, "insurgents," bad guys... terrorists, those are the ones on the other side.  And all powers are used to summon those worth fighting against.  D-Day...

But what if Americans stayed home?  Would it be all that bad?  Would the Taliban come and kill us all?  Or is it rather that we don't make any friends around the world when we send in troops with guns to tell other people how to run their own lives with our democracy?  How unpatriotic that seems, to wonder, to depart from the narration of Memorial Day Concert, American's sons and daughters.

Lincoln's prose and phrasing seem useful to such narrations, such blind patriotism, and I wonder how he would feel about such things.  His calculus, over a particular issue, allowed a great war.  But enough, he would have said, that one was enough, no more, no more blind patriotic fanfare justifying the excesses of military spending, the numbers of crippled wounded and dead, the excesses of stirred emotions a la Hitler one finds here in some seemingly innocuous form.

Still, we can sing God Bless America and mean it, without excess.

I agree--it is tiresome analyzing everything, going around in circles.  But what else are you going to do?  How else are you going to climb out of the mess?  How else are you going to see clearly?

War is a by-product of the egotism of story telling, the addiction of believing in a story 'that must be true.'  A coworker taking a Masters in Peace and Conflict Resolution talked to us one day over our pre shift "family meal" about the million centuries old blood feuds and avenging that make up Middle East conflict.  Good luck, Francis.  May you succeed in taking the ego away from the Christian story to reveal its older Buddhist wisdom of laying aside things of the ego, aside with the sense of concrete self, aside with the compelling quality of the illusionary world.  Turn off the great ongoing Game of Thrones and awaken humanity from conflict, reciprocal attack, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, prejudice.

We are born gentle harmless creatures happy in our helplessness.  Part of us, at least, remains gentle, happy, good and kind, as the helplessness retreats, as we grow bigger, stronger, more powerful and able to take care of ourselves.  The helplessness of childhood transmutes into the helplessness of mortal adulthood.

Saturday night, Memorial Day weekend.  I go out to make a drug store run, taking care of a cold, pick some carry-out Chinese.  Connecticut Avenue is busy with tourist foot traffic, the open bars and restaurants full, people out experiencing conventional happiness, the relative degree of less pain.  There are groups of young women in enticing outfits talking with each other, guys checking them out.  In one bar, windows open to the street, young people are playing boardgames.  And in my Buddhist mind, I see it as a fair amount of automatic behavior, less considered, barely self-controlled, such that one would not be so surprised by the presence of a potential drive-by shooter somewhere in it all along with all the rest, given that people are acting however they''d like to and given that within that there is a small percentage of latent craziness.  It's all advertised to appear as fun, a good social time, but I cannot help see the dissatisfaction, the dissatisfactory nature of it.  At a gut level I see suffering.  And that's Buddhism, pure and simple, though you'd be had put to convince the people out on a Saturday night of it,  the Four Noble Truths, about dukkha, about suffering, about the unsatisfactory quality of life, about the source of suffering, about the release from suffering.  The most fundamental truth of being alive there is.

But what other option is there?  Where else are you going to be happy but somewhere not alone on a Saturday night?  Enmeshed in the world, thinking conventionally, of course you would be inclined to pursue forms of happiness in pleasant experiences, until you get honest with yourself.

My years as a barkeep have been a front row seat to the human condition just like that of the young prince who became the Buddha when he left the palace to observe the sick, the old, the dying.  The suffering was there all along, below the surface.  We all fall in to it, say, of course we are happy, because this is the only way to be happy, through relatively less suffering, until we stop and think about it, and pursue another way to live.

Drawn into conversation that assumes the normal purposes of a Saturday night, you're not going to win, because you've already become a part of its terms, silently shouted down as it were by assumptions normal to the social species.  To that way of thought, Buddhism is retreat, a state of being alone (and who wants that really), foolish really, a waste of life, youth, energy, good looks.

And I know from all the going away parties for our coworker off on adventure, there's little point bringing up Buddha, the wine starts flowing, you're in the world again, a part of it, part of its conversations and its egos.  You feel you have to reestablish who you are, etc.