This Is What I Believe

The past couple of weeks I've been sick. And I don't mean the garden variety sniffle or two. I mean the kind of sick where you shiver with cold and misery; where, even though you may have plenty of help and human love surrounding you, you feel distant from it all, forced into retreat. The fever makes you say strange things. The aching in your muscles keeps you up at night. And when some semblance of equilibrium is finally regained, and you find yourself out and about, engaged in your normal routine, you can't help feeling somewhat shaken. After all you've been informed, yes freshly informed that the vessel of your body is not unsinkable. Your mind is not unshakeable. Your happiness is under no warranty. You are mortal, vulnerable, prone to loss. These are of course good facts to know. But they are not easy ones to digest.

Being sick though, comes with its gifts as well. For one thing, the process of recuperation deeply changes your relationship to time, so that, if your relationship with that mysterious entity is usually one of animosity and struggle, well you can give that up right now, because there's no way back to health but to accept time as an ally and friend and to let it pass over you like the waves of the surf or like the notes of a chant. You see, all of that activity and motion that normally places you in opposition to time and in rebellion against the limits of time—I mean the shopping and the bank errands, the driving here and there, the business meetings, the busy ins and outs of your professional life—you have to give this all up, along with the can-do attitude and the bravado of control. You are no longer the “manager” of your time. Time is no longer yours to control. It is no resource of yours. It is its own master and always has been. You must give yourself up to time. Your assignment is to lie back under the blanket and be. It is to give yourself up to the taskless task of recuperation, the laborless labor of healing.

And what I'm saying is that the general experience of lying back and letting the office be an office without you, letting the dirty laundry stay dirty laundry and the cooking stay uncooked—all this has the power to connect us once again with the basic rhythms of the world. And here I mean the sort of world we knew in childhood, in which everything seemed to come with a mysterious signature of its own, which maybe you could not decipher directly or comprehend completely, but which you knew had meaning. Lying there in bed (quietly, receptively, as you did in childhood perhaps waiting for sleep) you hear the traffic outdoors and it communicates something to you. No longer is it faceless and random. Instead it feels like a presence in its own right, full of expressive thought; that stray flick of gravel thrown from the tire says something definite and true, equal absolutely to itself. Or as you watch the sunlight slanting in through the picture window, noting how it changes its slant slowly from hour to hour, somehow the slow fact of its motion fills you with gratefulness and with the simple two words “how beautiful.” 

Other transformations unfold themselves, like angels of Van Eyck opening their peacock-rainbow wings. When I was ten years old, and sick with pneumonia, convalescing in an old house (in a town without birches called Birch Run) my mother's houseplants gained character and charisma and presence and soul as I sat with them hour after hour trying to breath: I remember the Hindu rope, complexly knotted with leaves a marbled green and white. And the Christmas cactus, saying "It's December again," in the language of curly shrimp-like flowers. The philodendron that climbed any stick. The rubber plant that bled an immaculate white latex when cut—all these together arranged themselves into a sort of living choir of contemplation, whose song consisted of the modulations of silence—a silence comparable to the one I have savored over the course of my illness here at Sunnyside in the company of my own plant collection: my delicate ivies, my bushy quartet of Norfolk pines, a gnarled jade that used to belong to my mother, and all the rest I love. 

It is the great mental tragedy of our wasteful and consumptive times that we take nothing seriously unless we can place it outside ourselves, and doll it up as a metaphysical stranger to us; a not-me that we can comfortably measure with a stick and with properly placed numbers. This mulish reductionism, this tragedy of apartness from the inner truth of things, this puniness of heart, this obsession with surfaces, this insistence on the enoughness of the artificial, this scorn of the imagination, this neurotic turning of our backs on our own inner life, this perpetual epistemology of doubt, this distrust of the competence of the human mind (even a child's!) to place itself in the universe accurately, and to assess the meaning of its life in relationship with that universe: all this is tragic in the deepest sense. For it is was and is preventable. 

It is time once again for us all to say, along with Hamlet, that great saint of the Universal-Inward: “Here I am! I am not nothing! I am a mind! I am a will! I am a perceiving soul! A powerful angel of awareness! A stubborn barnacle of thought upon the heaving ship of the infinite!” I am sick of people estimating their minds too low. I am tired of people enslaving themselves to convictions that an intelligent dog would not believe, namely that we have no will, that we are machines, that Consciousness itself—the Thing without which there would in fact be nothing—is, of all things, an illusion! An accidental illusory squirt. A poor and dismissible ghost in the neural machine. These convictions are, in fact, not only questionable, but very unlikely to be true. They are violently extreme. They certainly do not conform to common sense, and the metaphysics on which they are based is perplexed with self-contradictions. 

And yet again, these pronouncements and estimations of the non-existence of our thoughts are treated as self-evident axioms by people who ought to know better than not to doubt their axioms. Furthermore anyone who does dare to doubt them is dismissed as a throwback to a mathematical Frenchman who sited the soul in the pituitary gland. I am frankly sick of this. I am sick of investigators who never examine their metaphysics. Sick of researchers in neurology and biology who have never considered the perfectly obvious possibility that consciousness might be a primary phenomenon like Time or Space; after all, some of the best physicists (nearly a century ago now!) led by the redoubtable Neils Bohr considered consciousness in the informative act of observation to be the best explanation for how so many interesting and perplexing things happen in the world of the very small. How so much information seems to gets around. 

You may think I am getting off my original subject. I assure you I am not. I am on the subject of sickness and health. And here is what I wonder: I wonder if we may need to lie down as a civilization in order to see again, as I needed to lie down in my sickness in order to wake up once again to the speech of the world. I wonder whether our rationalist reductionist materialist take on the world is so far off of the accurate balance that it might be possible to say that we are insane and that our civilization is insane. And again there is no fix but to lie down and "see feelingly" toward a new vision of ourselves and our relationship with the earth.

I think all this is very possible. 

Consider after all what our civilization produces. We base our economy on consumption, and so very thoroughly does the practice of consumption rule our world that it can be said that the two most plentiful products of our civilization are waste heat and garbage. That is what we make. Overwhelmingly! Waste heat and garbage! And a poisoned, wasted earth is the outward sign of our “progress” in this endeavor. And in our work of consumption, who are our most intimate and powerful allies but our machines? Our combustion engines and refrigerators, our conveyor belts and lasers, our computers programmed to speculate and sell in order to fan the flames of consumption. 

And tell me, dear Reader: is there no connection, none, between how we have thought of ourselves these past two or three centuries of the industrial age, and what we and our machines have made of our world? No connection between the destruction we have wrought with our machines upon the earth, and our insistence that we ourselves are machines, and that the earth we inhabit is a machine? A stranger-machine at that, an enemy machine, a competitor that we must master and overwhelm? 

And is it not possible to say that, in this regard, we are insane? 

Surely it's time to dismantle this metaphor. Time to lie down and think of other metaphors until the machine-mind evaporates away. Time to look inward to consider a world choked with the beauty of inwardness. With texts that can be read inwardly by us. And read with joy and reverence and sympathy and love.

We are living beings. As is the earth. As is the magical universe itself, that has given rise to us, its children. We are not simply piles of separable parts keeping time. Furthermore our minds are capable of intent. And our intentions culminate and find their most burning accurate center in acts of tenderness, imagination, and love. We can give freely of ourselves! Without reference to the machine! We can speak the word "love," and know what it means and know what it costs, and then not just say it, but make it happen—love. We can dare to say “beauty is what I inwardly see, and infinity too, in the green context of my home the earth, where the fishes swim and the birds take to the air joyously and fly, and nothing can take the reality of beauty from me, nor the infinity of the inward: no not all the reductionist fantasies of “here you are, we've got you, we've pinned you down, little mechanical-computational human being, and you are nothing really, nothing that cannot be explained, or at the least explained away.” 

Again, in the words of William Blake the poet and engraver, “We become what we behold.” Thus if we see ourselves as nothing more than computational machinery, and measure everything around us as machinery, we will inevitably become like machinery ourselves: Thoughtless. Inwardly impoverished. Incapable of change or mindful attention, and above all, less given to the practice of love. And in hewing to this vision we will destroy ourselves. There is no question about this. All we need do is look around us and see what that vision of the machine has, over the past three centuries, wrought upon our home the earth. To continue in this path is true insanity. A deep sickness from which we must all awake!

It is a curious and almost inexplicable habit of human beings to enslave themselves to their own metaphors, until they forget they ever made them up, and therefore have the power to change them. But! If we change our metaphors, we change our minds; we behold something new. 

So. What will our new metaphor be? Shall we be living beings again with souls? Gardeners of the earth? Guardians of the planet? Crafters of beauty? Lovers of the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, able to speak to them all? Well then! That will not be the end of it, for the world that we inhabit will change as well. And the beauty and the scale of that change will be extraordinary. It will be a beauty, the likes of which we cannot at present even conceive. 

This is what I believe.

HB

Next Post Friday, January 9!

Trying to Enjoy Ourselves, Trying to Learn

When I was fourteen, I had some fairly serious thoughts about playing clarinet professionally. I read all my father's old music history books (he has a degree in musicology). I listened to hours of classical music on the radio every day. I practiced with some real discipline. And that particular summer, when my father suggested that I go to music camp, I said sure why not? 

Man did I ride it high that summer at camp! I was a year younger than the others, so a bit of a wunderkind reputation stuck to me. I was top dog clarinetist in the band. I asked questions in music theory that hinted at some basic knowledge of harmony, which also caused a bit of a stir. Most astonishingly of all, a flutist (really cute) took to waiting outside my practice room door for me, listening. She would wait till I was done, and when I came out, she'd talk to me. Honestly I was so flummoxed with my good luck there, that I squandered it by telling her the fib that I already had a girlfriend back home. At the end of the two weeks, when my father came to pick me up and asked me what I had learned, I was exhilarated. I was also a bit puffed up. But I had plenty to report, and I'm sure that in general he was pleased. 

A year went by. I had earned a scholarship for a second round at the camp, and so I went again. Needless to say, the reprise was an unmitigated disaster. Nothing, nothing, nothing was the same. No wunderkind reputation. No cute flutist. No opportunities for showing my blinding erudition in the science of harmony (I didn't feel like paying attention in class). Heck, I didn't even make first chair in the band! So, on the final day of camp, after the final concert, when my father picked me up to take me home in the car, what did I have to report? 

“Nothing,” I said. 

“Nothing?!” he asked. “Two weeks at music camp and you learned nothing?”

I should have heard it in his voice right then and there. The consternation. The surprise. It was like that moment in King Lear, when Lear asks Cordelia to amend her answer about how much she loves him: “Nothing will come of nothing” he says. Though of course my situation was hardly so innocent as Cordelia's. Which was also why, unlike Cordelia, I could not be silent, and instead let loose like an armory on fire with a long inventory of complaints. The dorms were unbearably hot. The auditions were rigged. My roommate was a percussionist. No one was friendly to me. The classes were too basic. The food was rot. And there was not enough Mozart. 

We were not out of town yet, and my father actually pulled over and stopped the car. Even with the scholarship, he said, my family had paid good money to help me learn something that month. And good people at the camp had taken the time to teach me. What was my problem? So I wasn't first chair in the clarinet section? What difference should that have have made? And so what about any of the rest of my complaints? None of them need to have prevented me from deepening my acquaintance with the classical tradition. My laziness and refusal to learn had been the response of a spoiled child, not that of a thoughtful committed musician. 

“Did you even try to enjoy yourself?” he demanded, finally. “Did you even try to learn?”

So here it is the end of the year 2014, and once again most of us find ourselves looking back and wondering where all the time went. What we did with it. Whether we spent it wisely. And as usual for myself, being the imperfect person I am, I can think of plenty of choices I made over the past year that were questionable. Choices comparable to the choices I made that second summer at music camp—choices to sulk and to retire into myself, and to withhold my passion and intelligence from the proper spheres of their application. Times when, instead of just getting to work, I just complained. Times when I allowed myself to despair. Times when I just applied irony to every situation, as if irony were ever truly constructive!

Then I hear my father's words: “Did you ever even try to enjoy yourself? Did you ever even try to learn?” and I have to say no and repent of my mistakes there and say to myself "Well, I hope I can do better this next year."

On the other hand I can also think of times when I did okay. Times when instead of despairing, I just got down to work. Times when I gamely took my chances, despite doubts, because I judged the risk was worth it. Times when I just swallowed my pride and let someone's purposeful injury to me just be, by saying “I am not my ego; my ego is not me.”  Times when, in spite of bad news coming in from all corners of the world, I managed to focus on what I could do in local time and space to make it just a little better: maybe by weeding the garden. Or sitting down and making a little music with a friend. Or just finding something to laugh at... 

Times in other words, when I think I really did manage to enjoy myself and to learn a little more about the beautiful slippery mystery that is my life. And hey guess what? Those are the moments and experiences that I am proudest of, looking back, and the ones I hope to manage to make happen just a little more often in the coming year. And by the way, I don't expect rapid improvement in these departments. It's hard figuring out how to make enjoyment and learning happen. They don't just happen by themselves. You have to work at them. You have to give up some of your pride.

Best wishes to all of you, my readers, in the year to come! You honor me with the gift of your time. Your attention to my work is truly one of the great satisfactions of my life!

HB

(Next Post January 1st)

The Death of a Squirrel

He lay on his side on the sidewalk, white and gray, and there was nothing hideous about him. His eyes were closed, there was no blood. I don't think he was struck by a car. I wonder if he died of a fall; such things do happen. Or of a sickness. Though his coat was rich. And he looked plump enough. Who knows? The tree nearest to where he lay was a silver maple, and a very tall and handsome tree at that, planted close enough to the sidewalk to have caused some buckling in the concrete. When I first came on the body, I looked up into the branches of the tree, wondering if maybe he had a nest there. I didn't see one, so maybe it wasn't exactly home to him. Still, you might call it his final address. And I would also say that, if you could choose a tree under which to stretch out and die—something simulating the dome of heaven, like the fan vault at King's College in Cambridge—that silver maple would be a pretty good choice. I wouldn't have minded it for my own last view. 

The house, in front of which stands the silver maple and beneath which lay the squirrel, used to belong to a couple who were living in the neighborhood when we first moved to Sunnyside. They were about our age, maybe a little younger, and they had a baby, and their neighbors also had a baby. The babies learned to walk, and they were friends, in the way that babies are friends, playing in familiar parallel with each other until boom there's some kind of collision of desires or maybe even an actual collision that has to be cleared away by the parents. Anyhow it was always so pleasant back in our first days in the neighborhood, during the warm months, to walk past those two houses in the late afternoon or early evening, because there they would be, all the grown-ups just watching the babies and chatting away. It was exactly the way a neighborhood ought to be. 

Well then one of the couples sold the one house and moved somewhere else in the area, and the other (the family with the silver maple) went to Peru believe it or not, because that's where the father's folks were from and I guess some opportunity presented itself in the way of work. Now at the house with the maple, there are no babies outside. Not anymore. Instead what happens is that during the warmer times of the year, the lawn service comes now and then with their chemical fingers to turn the knobs on the flower garden and to adjust the contrast level on the lawn occasionally too. Then in winter the driveway gets plowed, but the sidewalk does not. Instead the snow just piles up on the sidewalk beneath the maple. I wonder if the owner even knows that there is a sidewalk. I kind of doubt it. I mean, just look at the squirrel.

Well finally I guess I just decided it was time for someone to show some respect. Some reverence for the dead. Some sense of class about the sidewalk. So the day before yesterday, I buried the squirrel—just off the walk, but still snug up to the maple. I used just what tools and materials I had on hand, which was a thick stick and some garden dirt and some pieces of bark and also some spare but useful moments of my time. 

As I worked, I sang. I sang to the body of the squirrel. I have a kind of shaman-sounding voice that I use when I'm working with anything natural now, especially plants, but I guess with squirrels too. It's nothing impressive, this singing voice. Just a sort of right-brained glossolalia sung down low, that I like to make to lilt. And I'm convinced that the plants recognize it and enjoy it. And maybe the ghost of a squirrel. Why don't I just sing in English? Well, because regular words are just way too specific. They don't say anything that's wide enough to encompass what I'm trying to communicate to plants and squirrels and such like. But the shaman voice does, and so that's what I use. 

But so I sang. I sang to a bunch of squirrel memories. Memories of jumping from branch to branch like an acrobat. Of hiding nuts away in gutters and flower gardens and garage attics. Of eating all those nuts for midnight snack. Of walking along the telephone wires now and then. Of chasing other squirrels here and there for love and hate. Of curling up on a rainy day in a nest of leaves tucked away in the fork of some high-up branches of an oak, and just lying there and moving with the wind. Swaying here and there. Nothing wrong with that. Just being lazy some days. Just being lazy like that. 

So anyway I sang as I moved him with a stick. And I sang as I slid him from the sidewalk to the base of the maple tree—to a sort of harbor there between two large, kindly roots. And I sang a little more as I dug some dirt with the same stick and covered him up with it. And finally I sang as I took a few pieces of maple bark and planted them on top of the little mound of dirt. Like flags I guess. Here lies a squirrel. Friend of this maple. Friend of the earth.

And now I'm writing this. Well squirrel. This is just to say that someone knows you're gone. Thanks for your life in our neighborhood. Thanks for your death on the sidewalk, by means of which you gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with what St. Francis called our Brother Death. Thanks for choosing the maple, if that was your choice. And thanks for the chance to remember the family that went to Peru. And just in general thanks for giving me a little chance to be decent. And to sing. Hope you liked it. It's sure a beautiful world isn't it? I do wish more of us would notice it.

Cheers and have a good afterlife. Maybe in Peru?

HB

(Next post December 22nd)

Playing the Part (part two)

I'm picking up here on last week's discussion, in which I introduced the concept of scripts beyond the playwright's script. These are not, strictly speaking, written scripts, but actions we observe and copy. Ceremonies we live by. Phrases we catch and pass on like germs. Attitudes we get good at projecting—all just by living and watching and being the social beings that we are, and all stored away in a sort of inner mental script library, to be dug out again and again as needed, as circumstances demand. 

A script in this sense is not a difficult concept to groove to, once you get the idea, and of course I'm hardly claiming it's original to me, or even that it's unmatched as a metaphor (the concept of algorithms is maybe a good parallel). But if you're still puzzling over what I mean, a few examples might help. Last week I referred to the Disgruntled Patient script. Everyone knows that routine—the words, the look, the attitude; put them together and you have what I'm calling a script. And anyone who has been in a job interview knows the need, in that situation, for a script. As does every contestant in a beauty pageant.

This week I'm interested in scripts for society at large: cultural scripts, economic scripts, political scripts, all of which channel our behavior at the macro level. Take, on the brighter side of experience, the non-violent protest script, created by folks like Gandhi and King, and honed to perfection under all sorts of difficult conditions. It's a powerful script indeed, and one that's almost literal: with mapped-out routes for marches, snappy slogans to shout, props to hold and carry, understood limits to behavior. And it really is worth reflecting on the organized, invented nature of a protest or protest march. In my book, the non-violent protest (especially in the context of civil disobedience)  is one of the great inventions of the last three or four centuries, right up there with the scientific method and organic agriculture. I mean it. It's hard to over-value something so instrumental to so many good outcomes! Indian independence, de-segregation in the United States, the end of communism in eastern Europe. May the list go on!

At the same time we mustn't get sidetracked by praise, because scripts always have their downsides too—downsides tied, in fact, directly to their strengths. Note for instance that one of the qualities that makes the performance of any script successful is what you might call its automaticity, that is, the almost memorized nature of it. The ability of the performers to stick to the script without really having to think too hard. Again, in the context say of the street protest, this automaticity is useful and good. It keeps people safe precisely because if you're following the script, yelling the slogan, lifting the sign, speaking your mind, you don't stop to ask, “Should I throw this rock?” or “What if I just wailed on that policeman?” You just follow the script and hopefully things will be okay. 

Unfortunately, the same automaticity, especially in the performance of scripts that are not framed by a beginning or an end, often serves to prevent our ever questioning the value of the script or the assumptions that helped to write it. It may even cause us to confuse a mere script with a demonstration of objective truth. 

Take what I call the “Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas” script. It's a pretty common script around the world, and has been for a long time in my country. It encourages people to get off their couches and shop. To travel long distances with jets. To replace their gadgets yearly. To start new businesses and to hire new help. To look for work with confidence. To invest in the stock market and real estate and in a college education. To take out loans to buy new houses.To feel cheerful and optimistic when the economic reports indicate what the economists and the government define for us as growth, and also to feel depressed when, by the same definitions and measures, the economy shrinks. 

Here's the secret though—one to be whispered discretely from every rooftop: "Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas" is a script, culturally learned and defined. It's a set of directions and slogans and responses and assumptions that are all so ingrained in us, so memorized and smooth with use, that we forget it's just a script, written with certain assumptions in mind—assumptions that can be questioned, and probably should be. But that cannot be questioned until we step outside of the script ourselves! 

Now, here in my country, we're only beginning to ask whether economic growth is compatible with the ecological health of the planet, or whether it really encourages human happiness, or lends meaning to existence, or whether it can even continue indefinitely (it can't, of course, for reasons economic, mathematical, thermodynamic, and ecological!). Even these question though are only being asked at the radical fringe, while in many other places in the world—say India, China, Brazil—well, my understanding is that the popularity of the Pajamas in question is still very much on the upswing. Soon enough, the script may be so globally known, so well digested and assimilated into so many cultures, that most citizens of the world probably won't see it as a script at all, but as the objective truth of things as they really are. Everyone will be wearing the cat's pajamas. Or almost everyone. 

This is not a happy situation. In my opinion. The Earth can't take much more of the same beating we're giving it, in order to have this growth. And Earth happens to be the island where we live. Our beautiful island in space. Our only home. Continue to follow this script, and the story has an end all right. Just not a happy one. Indeed a very bleak and ugly one. 

For what it's worth, I don't expect the citizens of the world to start questioning "Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas" anytime soon. Eventually yes, but only as one of the effects of a long drawn out decline in prosperity, accompanied by the occasional spectacle of a market crash or two, not to mention the melting of many icebergs. I wish that we could start asking the necessary questions and changing our lives before all those unpleasant things occurred. But it seems to me that it's just not a human habit to think ahead and make sacrifices now, so that a good story (in a beautiful setting) can go on.

Or is that a fair evaluation of what humans are capable of? You dear reader, will help decide.

HB

(Next Post Monday, December the 15th)