There is a pained and painful part of writing. It happens when you've made it through the deal-with-reality part of the week, the awkward return to the notepad after the other job. If you're lucky you have a chance to avoid reading the newspaper, on-line headlines stories, and all but the most essential and non-interfering kind of emails or other form of verbal communication. This alone, the avoidance, is hard to do. The mind craves even the commercials of the Weather Channel as it waits for a radar scan.

The first sentences are small, slow-coming, awkward, not certain of where to land or where to begin. In their miserable state, the grow, as ripples, and then, maybe you see the water.

It is a completely different landscape from the norm, the writer finds. Where people drive, the writer either stays put or walks. Where people work on a future, a career, the writer writes, keeping an odd job that doesn't really lead anywhere. People improve their lot through hard work; through hard work, the writer's lot gets worse. People grow up, earn incomes, start families; the writer depends increasingly on charity.

Thus, you may see it less a matter of craft, more about truly living a life of a certain kind. That life may cause you to admit things that perhaps you wouldn't have, at a certain point, been so comfortable with, too happy about. But there you go; it is what it is.

These are the conditions under which, then as now, Buddhist thinking emerges. Once you grasp those basics, life opens up. You understand great art.



I was in a good exchange on Facebook with my friend Pierre, with whom I talk about writing and reality. They are very helpful dialogues for me. They have come to represent a conversation between two writers, even if we are only writers in some early state, maybe part pretend, but trying really as best as we can, anyway, and as the spirit allows and leads one. I had a phrase which led him to remind me of that musician of words, Jacques Brel. I love Jacques Brel. I have a good 10 CDs ready for the music system at work. We've since switched to Pandora and internet radio, and the CD collection gathers dust, so it's been a while, some time, when I remembered my iTunes collection of hits and more obscure songs of Mr. Brel. I have a small collection of tabs of Brel songs printed off from the internet, sheets of the lyrics, so that I have a few lines to sing along with.

Brel is music I never find tedious. "Ces gens-lå," (that's not the right accent, for soft 'a') came to mind immediately. A thumping bass and piano, playing two minor chords, V to I, back and forth, a somber heartbeat underneath Brel's story of people in a small town. We don't get to play it too much at the restaurant; it may come across as a little heavy for light dining conversation, or maybe too theatrical, too much loud after too much soft. There is a light in Mr. Brel's town, Frida, and maybe one day, maybe one day, well, I'll let you take a look at it on YouTube or wherever, and figure it out. The townspeople, told from the perspective of an outcast. I don't think it is a trite song. I don't take it as a clichéd song. There is too much art, too much originality to it. A remarkable performance, as so much of Brel is.

There are many other songs that immediately come to mind of Brel. They cover quite a range. They go places not too many song do.

Are Brel's leading us toward Buddhist perception with the stories of change that they are? I would offer that his songs are certainly part of that writer's landscape, different from, removed, encompassing, the lives of others. The step of actually becoming enlightened in the Buddhist sense, at least as an intellectual form of making sense out of life, which is all we can ask, remains hidden, not explicitly achieved. But there is substance satisfying to the Buddhist in them, very much so.



"CES GENS-LÀ"
1966


D'abord d'abord y a l'aîné
Lui qui est comme un melon
Lui qui a un gros nez
Lui qui sait plus son nom
Monsieur tellement qui boit
Ou tellement qu'il a bu
Qui fait rien de ses dix doigts
Mais lui qui n'en peut plus
Lui qui est complètement cuit
Et qui se prend pour le roi
Qui se saoule toutes les nuits
Avec du mauvais vin
Mais qu'on retrouve matin
Dans l'église qui roupille
Raide comme une saillie
Blanc comme un cierge de Pâques
Et puis qui balbutie
Et qui a l'oeil qui divague
Faut vous dire Monsieur
Que chez ces gens-là
On ne pense pas Monsieur
On ne pense pas on prie

Et puis y a l'autre
Des carottes dans les cheveux
Qu'a jamais vu un peigne
Ouest méchant comme une teigne
Même qu'il donnerait sa chemise
A des pauvres gens heureux
Qui a marié la Denise
Une fille de la ville
Enfin d'une autre ville
Et que c'est pas fini
Qui fait ses petites affaires
Avec son petit chapeau
Avec son petit manteau
Avec sa petite auto
Qu'aimerait bien avoir l'air
Mais qui n'a pas l'air du tout
Faut pas jouer les riches
Quand on n'a pas le sou
Faut vous dire Monsieur
Que chez ces gens-là
On ne vit pas Monsieur
On ne vit pas on triche

Et puis y a les autres
La mère qui ne dit rien
Ou bien n'importe quoi
Et du soir au matin
Sous sa belle gueule d'apôtre
Et dans son cadre en bois
Y a la moustache du père
Qui est mort d'une glissade
Et qui recarde son troupeau
Bouffer la soupe froide
Et ça fait des grands chloup
Et ça fait des grands chloup
Et puis il y a la toute vieille
Qu'en finit pas de vibrer
Et qu'on n'écoute même pas
Vu que c'est elle qu'a l'oseille
Et qu'on écoute même pas
Ce que ses pauvres mains racontent
Faut vous dire Monsieur
Que chez ces gens-là
On ne cause pas Monsieur
On ne cause pas on compte

Et puis et puis
Et puis y a Frida
Qui est belle comme un soleil
Et qui m'aime pareil
Que moi j'aime Frida
Même qu'on se dit souvent
Qu'on aura une maison
Avec des tas de fenêtres
Avec presque pas de murs
Et qu'on vivra dedans
Et qu'il fera bon y être
Et que si c'est pas sûr
C'est quand même peut-être
Parce que les autres veulent pas
Parce que les autres veulent pas
Les autres ils disent comme ça
Qu'elle est trop belle pour moi
Que je suis tout juste bon
A égorger les chats
J'ai jamais tué de chats
Ou alors y a longtemps
Ou bien j'ai oublié

Ou ils sentaient pas bon
Enfin ils ne veulent pas
Enfin ils ne veulent pas
Parfois quand on se voit
Semblant que c'est pas exprès
Avec ses yeux mouillants
Elle dit qu'elle partira
Elle dit qu'elle me suivra
Alors pour un instant
Pour un instant seulement
Alors moi je la crois Monsieur
Pour un instant
Pour un instant seulement
Parce que chez ces gens-là
Monsieur on ne s'en va pas
On ne s'en va pas Monsieur
On ne s'en va pas
Mais il est tard Monsieur
Il faut que je rentre chez moi.



Thanks to MrJacquesbrel for the YouTube posting from January 28, 2010.

Okay, okay. What was it? The odd juxtaposition of finding myself watching a PBS piece about the Aztecs after viewing over the last few weeks, America, The Story Of Us, that the bell went off, something about human sacrifice demanded by kings and priests and the culture in general. What was it that had begun to turn me off about the fine production, grandly and carefully done, bringing out the best middle brow minds, I mean, the ones who we recognize as being able to speak for 'us.'

First of all, what's not to like about Liev Schreiber's narration... a newscaster voice, bottled John Chancellor and Cronkite, Reasoner, etc. Different than Peter Coyote. This is a bigger, deeper instrument, weighty and solid. We're meant to trust it. Throw in a patchwork of diverse commentators who peek in from time to time. Meryl Streep. Henry Louis Gates. Donald Trump. Michael Douglas. Tom Brokaw. Martha Stewart.

Okay. It's clear. Here are the voices of Authority. Here are people who have been there, it seems. At least that's how it sounds. A theme emerges. "Time and time again, Americans have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, persevered through difficult times, not given up, kept on, discovered, invented, a new way."

One can see why they chose a variety of people to step in and tell us, through their personality and authority, what happened in the nation's space at a particular time. A professional actor, now with the gravitas of grey hair, inhabits the lives of many Rosie the Riveters. Brokaw is, with grand burgundian voice, an elder statesman of historians, knowing the national pulse.

Well, you're clearly a shit if you have any complaints, if you have any inner 'hmmm, there's something about this that makes me not so sure about it all.' How can you be critical when Mr. Brokaw--always liked the guy--delivers that handy 'here's the meaning, the neat clear-cut happy ending' stuff? After all, he did a great job with his series on the Baby Boomers. It must be that the edited-down soundbite style of this piece didn't suit his more complicated understandings, as he gets different sides of a thing.

But, there's something here that's making me highly suspicious about the whole series. To qualify, you can't argue with timelines, or with an analysis that boils down pretty much everything into "modern marvel" model. Technology.

It's a neat story. You can't argue with it. Hey, we all lead material lives. Here's a Civil War Colonel who figured out a brigade to sweep the shit off of New York's streets. Here's how the American militias fought, here's how the great dams were built, here's the outcome of technology.

A pean to technology and the economy, played on brass. As interested as I was, and engaged by it, I don't know... what's making me feel weird about the whole thing?

Technology, apparently, will always be, if we work hard enough, if we take enough risks, the thing that saves us. Ingenuity like the Romans had building aqueducts to feed fresh clean water to a city. America needs something to be invented and carried out in order to survive, hey, we will do it.

Yet, it all could potentially come across as a form of propaganda to invest in a certain kind of spending. A building of some kind of might. Like maybe the sort of thing that happened in Germany after the hard deal of WWI.

Turning the channel, one could imagine a faithful subject being led up the long steps to the altar where hearts were cut out with obsidian knife. Listening all the while to an interpretation spread by sponsored voices mellow and soothing and informative, convincing in their storytelling.

But of course that comparison falls apart. Many of those dragged up those steps came from subject states, prisoners of war. That we are not here, so we hope, in this story of 'us.'

There is an intellectual story, an artistic story, a cultural story, a people story, a spiritual story, one of deep soul-searching, going on here in a rich multi-cultured, maybe too hard and complicated to tell, but indispensable. Yes, that soul-searching, that looking for broader deeper meanings took hold here from the start, and we are not the same people without that, without Lincoln and Gettsyburg, without the Civil Rights Movement, without unions and child labor laws, on back to the basic documents of inalienable rights and equality, things which happen to jive with the spiritual, with the golden law toward neighbors.

American Heritage

American literature, knowingly, consciously or not, represents an awakening to the same truths elicited and elucidated by the Buddha. American literature represents an organic awakening, quietly on a leading edge. American literature has a point. American literature will be what saves us. American literature is the nation's most important work.

It comes from quiet corners, folks different as Dickinson, Melville and Kerouac. Include Lincoln and Hemingway in its spirit and many others. Certainly it merges with the poetry of England, sharing the same language and tradition, but American has been bolder, more explicit, and maybe finds its realizations more crucial, more vital.

Buddhism, by which we refer to as a system of thought, is a necessary reaction to a commercial culture constantly revolving around a hyper constant market economy. (Buddhism is at least turning off the TV and thinking on one's own, a dismissal of the illusions offered behind each product.) Its noble truths wait amidst obvious signs of the great decay cannibalizing unregulated market place of self-based wants, needs and desires, weary, exhausted, played-out.

Melville's Ahab is a symbol of many things. In him we find economic greed leading to plundered resources, a heightened sense of self as something distinct, therefore wronged, therefore needy, therefore vengeful. His is a steady path to destruction. Melville had seen the industry up close. His great book was oddly not very popular (joke) with a public pressed into believing in the sanctity of forwarding economic fortunes and the subsequent 'trickle down' of the day. Look at what's going on the Gulf of Mexico today. Thanks, Captain Ahab. You really served us well.

Emily Dickinson waited quietly until she realized the main impetus behind her work. Her 'Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--In Corners--till a day The Owner passed--identified--And carried Me away--' It was not a selfish entity writing her poems, but one vigorously opposed, a 'deadly foe,' to the habitually self-assured illusions of the world of the economic and social intercourse the more selfish entities press upon us. Words were her deeds, and while of course she died, never to come back, the deeds of her words, oddly enough, are quite with us today, as teachings.

Kerouac came along years later, armed himself with good books he found for free (what he could afford) at the San Jose Public Library, not that he ever had much of a problem finding and reading literature in an industrious fashion. Buddhism is explicit for him. In similar fashion to Melville's Ishmael, if not for Melville himself, Kerouac grew successful at creating a product, therefore an economic entity. (Hey, we all need to make a living.) The subsequent popularity and stress was not the best thing for such an open and vulnerable thinker too kind not to say no to intruders, in true Buddhist fashion. (well, yes and no.) Still, we can be very gratitude for Kerouac's careful scholarly presentation of the noble truth into a reading mainstream; the work he leaves behind is a solid building block, a foundation.

Industrial revolution, slavery, robber barons, factory conditions, child labor, the Native American, countless issues came home to roost in the new country, and the nation's minds couldn't help but try to responsibly consider them down to the core. To a tuned ear, Lincoln's writings and speeches present a Christianity stripped down to a Buddhist core. A house, that which is beyond self, cannot stand against itself, cannot allow itself to be swept up in selfish considerations. There are deeds, good ones and bad ones, and they have consequences. That is Buddhist to the core. Through the test defined by him at Gettysburg, on through The Second Inaugural's putting away of selfish passion to embrace an enemy as a brother, Lincoln reeks of Buddhist thought, not that there is much of a record of him reading such texts. Interesting that great minds reach a similar conclusion. Perhaps it's not so odd that a man considered 'a baboon,' a country bumpkin, would, left to his own devices start to think in a grand and radical way, and take his position as an opportunity to present a great vision. He sheltered hatred for no one, having been humbled in life. He was a resourceful man, invented things, made use of useful things to a higher aim.

Twain, Dreiser, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, in them one can read the same argument about self and illusions. They speak to a nation growing ill on its own excesses. They bring us individual struggling with mindfulness and sometimes reaching it, becoming oddly and beautifully liberated, like Huck with his dignified friend Jim going down a big river, selfish illusion off on either bank, Buddha himself loving rivers as a way of illustrating his lessons.

Of course, this is not to say that any effort outside America, a floating imaginative place anyway, a creation of our minds, will not have the same tendencies. Rather, similar, which leads one to think that a great writers has an intuitive feel, a balance that is not far removed from the truths of Buddha. Chekhov, Saramago...

So we have the organic movement now, and get quite a bit better with consciousness, yoga, meditations. We'll come to plant non-competing plants in between our amber waves of grain as a way of handling weeds, as Monsanto's once helpful chemical offerings don't work anymore. We won't place our retirement investments in hands concerned only with profit's Tower of Babel. We'll buy into that which is healthy for all of us.

My lovely Polish neighbor tells a story. She and her husband have escaped from Soviet Bloc Poland to Stockholm. (They were putting him on a train to Siberia. He slipped away.) They have with them basically just the clothes they are wearing, a few photographs. Free of possessions, she describes the moment as a feeling of bliss, the joy of freedom.

Such a moment is rare, for the most of us, for much of our days, but every now and then, there comes a pleasant whiff of that feeling, maybe a day off, so maybe it's not so rare. Today I will tell the reader the story of finally deciding not to buy the cheap car a friend had interested in me. Good little car, nothing against it, but between the bureaucracy of parking in the rare free zones, that of getting a mechanic to pre-inspect it before seeing if the car would pass DC Inspection, fixing a few things, new seat belts, insurance, temporary tags, etc., to say nothing of traffic, I finally came to a simple decision. (Maybe the fact that the AC doesn't happen to work was part of this today.)

I went and parked out back behind the Bistrot, where I had first picked it up and driven it, not quite legally, away. To celebrate, I went grocery shopping, and walked home through the woods with my groceries on my back.

I sometimes think that by simple virtue of being incarnated, i.e. living, in the world, we are cast as forms of mental patients. We are very simple beings, in as far as our minds operate. And of course the modern world throws complications at us in the course of living. Stuff that is really a bit beyond us, but that, good creatures that we are, we manage. Cars, bank accounts, telephones, jobs and bosses, and, if we're lucky, careers. To say nothing of family. Yet, balanced against that, is, maybe, a deep sense of some intangible issue, largely unconscious, but which, at times, we are awaken to. The matters of simple kindness, of being easy and peaceful, mindful of the nature of our deeds, responsible toward good ones.

Maybe in time we grow up, to integrate the automobile into the sangha, into the community which acts are good. I hope for such days. But in the meantime, I don't so much mind walking. Plus it's good exercise.



Post-script, dated 5/29/10, about 1:15 PM:

Interesting enough, May 27, 2010, brought me further liberation, as if to prove that if you can say no to one tempting demon of Mara and illusion's offer, you'll find a clear enough mind to let the bully's brethren fall. What you were down on yourself for not finishing, not providing, not doing, turns out to be quiet good fortune, a weight lifted, a bad self-image (which was based on some illusion of self one seems obliged to buy into) taken away, removed. Doubt, too, is a demon, one of the bad actions a person can fall to.

And what was left was like all good people in their good moments, a quiet content person, delighted with the world and its designs and all its lovely loving details, within and without.

There I was, without a car, without something else that might bear on a personal life such as a marriage or a career choice would, a complete figment of my imagination anyway I am, if I were selfish, embarrassed to say with respect to all parties. Other minds, rejecting, are wiser than my own, and I am grateful to the common wisdom. There I was, free, and happy, and feeling good, at peace, once again. Bless the stars above, the freedom they bring.

I have to wonder, if some books aren't written out of some form of a broken heart. Those words are of course tainted, as something hypocritical, but you know what I mean. Emily wrote her poems. Kerouac wrote his 'sad book.' Most critics would throw a significant number of others into that group, Twain, etc.

But maybe there is some bit of good news in all that, that a pot is boiled down to something we might call a primitive basic scientific understanding, a comforting expansive thought like those of the Buddha. Those thoughts, if you will, raise the level of dialogue above the same stale old issues kicking around in the news everyday, the mindset behind pollution, unkind deeds, excesses, etc.

Ahh, ladies and gentlemen, what can you do, what can you do? Take your 5-HTP pill, maybe go for a half hour walk, brood a bit, get to work (once there it won't be so bad), hope for the best, get home in one piece, live to battle another day. Good deeds, that's what it's all about, good deeds.



Giotto had the mind
to paint that wedding scene,
populating it with real life
just like you'd find.
Every day and ordinary.

An artist can, at times, be perfectly happy with a state another profession might take as neglect. The artist thrives in the condition another individual might take to be loneliness, regarding it as a chance to get something done. Or, he or she just gets use to it, doesn't complain about it, uses it to feed the vision, the spiritual backbone by which works are accomplished. In a given moment, a mind has many directions to go in, perhaps in the way an atom works, protonic thoughts zipping in energy around a glowing nucleus. In the quiet of neglect that mind operates as a whole, the core and the outer layers in tune, sympathetically vibrating, so that an outer thought concerning the world as it is manifested in all its detail is directly related to the centered wisdom at the core. To consider oneself as being neglected is some outward-based interference pattern that has not much to do with the wheels that tick away in some task that leaves the mind free to muse and work.

It is for such good reasons that artists, thinkers, writers, composers, etc., behave the way the do, with the inherent reward system of accomplishment they have placed an intuitive faith in and then pursued again and again. Another person though, may well regard such an individual's behavior as being that of a complete dope, not seeing the deeper mechanism, the core of the eternal mind ever engaged perhaps to the expense of the countless decisions and choices one is supposed to make in the course of labors and social lives. The artist may appear, from an outside perspective, 'not to care.' Which is far from the truth.

Eliot spoke of this healthy neglect in Preludes, the 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.' In fact, you can find it in a lot of art out there, or at least make it up if it's not there.

A writer must respect his own vision, follow it, walk its gangplank, find it within, adopt few others but broad ones into which you fit. That's what a book should be, the pursuit of a vision.

One reads Hemingway with a sense of nascent vision. It seems he had one, but he doesn't elaborate. There's evidence, and even action toward vision, hints, trails, and even maybe just the Zen of it. Old Man and the Sea seems too story-like, fabled, mythic. But, he felt the exuberance of discovering the secret of writing. And if anything, that exuberance, of a soldier's populism, bottles clinking beneath his hospital bed, rubbing elbows with his new buddies in Europe over campfires, is close to being the core of his vision. His stories are descendent of Melville's ship.

A significant part of Hemingway's vision seems to have also centered around an element of self-promotion, an emphasis on self that a Buddhist or a more modest person would not be comfortable with. However, it's fair to say that his work added to us, that his form of sunlight is by its nature a positive force for humanity, by more than sheer force of intellect and capturing of detail. There was a generosity to the man. As my Polish neighbor tells me, he loved life. And what the hell, if writing is good for your morale, on a daily basis, good for you, Ernie, you go, man.

That exuberance is akin to Shakespeare's secret, unknown, of late nights, theater people, Falstaff actors; thus Hemingway's fanciful comparison of boxing with Ol' Willy. (Shakespeare should be synonymous with the battle against ego, egos within and without.) The recognition of another lively soul, another person who edges into wanton behavior, boyishness. The writer recognizes that connection of getting easily excited about something. We read what we read because we feel the craving for life experiences, the indulgent edge that makes perfect sense.

Still, though, beyond his jocular love of writing prose, a final word on Hemingway would be to give him credit for his recognition of the state of 'beaten but not defeated.' That's close to a recognition that life offers constant change, thus to the Buddhist a suffering, a decay, from which is derived the understanding that a solid concrete self is illusory, especially in light of the great connectedness of all things in the universe.

Lincoln cracked, it seems, his personal ties to the tavern people he endured once. Had he bottomed out in his own way, semi-regularly, without having to engage in indulgences? Still, it seems, relative puritan that he came to be, as reported, about drinking, maybe a little too conspicuously, that he remained friendly to the boozy friendly bourbon-drinking smoke-filled-room-loving rowdy-conventioning gentlemen who got him elected. It helped, perhaps, that he was strong and big enough, a good enough wrestler, for a basic self-standing agreement. He would not allow himself to be bullied.

Kerouac admits his allegiance explicitly. "I'm for the mad ones..." But he too was athletic enough to escape them if he had to. He was also addicted to books and learning too. He read Proust. He had a way of framing his conversations with the world. (MacGowan reads Yeats' "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death." There is a tie between song and writing, Joyce being a fine tenor.)

When I left Amherst, I went to work in a place that served up forms of country music along with Ann Cashion's Tex-Mex. Songs about life, real life, unvarnished, about behaving badly, the whole gamut really. Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakum, Robert Earl Keen, Townes Van Zandt, Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Wallon & Willy, Johnny Cash, mixed in with contemporary stuff like 10,000 Maniacs and REM. My deep gratitude to Mr. Robert Wilder, all round great guy, for letting me in on being a part of a place called Austin Grill, the original one, up there on Wisconsin Avenue. (I was bussing tables, and they were doing my singing for me. Lazy as that is.)

To me, this aesthetic, if you will, is one of populism. I'd like to think it goes back to the building of Amherst College, when the local farmers chipped in, lent their backs to clearing out a hill top to build with brick and mortar a college. Oh, there were fancy guys back then too, no doubt, the bankers and the lawyers, Webster and Dickinson, along with names forgotten of farm-boys grown up who still liked to read. It was a joint venture, a community of high and low, would be one person's guess, maybe a sentimental one. I've always thought a populist touch, even though it might not bring a lot of gold reserves in, had something to do with it. (JFK's last speech, there, concerning Robert Frost, about an artist, whomever he was, having the task of following his vision, one of questioning power, even if that pursuit is disinterested, maybe especially because it is disinterested, has a populist ring to it.)

By which I mean, in contrast to an attitude of I know better, I am superior, I will show you disorganized slobs how to better manage your lives, the commercial selling of a whole life-cut out for us in neat patterns. That's creativity of another sort, often involved with creating wealth for wealth's sake, no? A house of tight perfection--no thank you. (I'll live my own way, see the light on my own, thank you.)

Some of us, I gather, just aren't cut out for a lucrative lot in life.

Lear asked for a show from his daughters, each to put on an act of how they loved him. Shakespeare rebelled against having to make such behavior, for he had that within which passeth show, a natural organic vision that let him, through his own basic instincts, understand everyone.