Snowball’s chance

October’s theme for qarrtsiluni is Change and Continuity, which, as some readers may have noticed, I’ve been riffing on here as well. I submitted the following series of linked prose pieces, but on reflection, my fellow editors and I felt that it didn’t really hang together all that well; the third threatens to overwhelm the first two, and really deserves to stand alone.

This editing is a tough job, and we worry about the extent to which blogging has made us lax in the standards we apply to ourselves and each other. It’s a peculiar, god-like dilemma: how to be appropriately merciless and compassionate at the same time…

1.
I stood watching traffic and thought: a winch, a windlass. Some iron drum on a medieval instrument of torture, allowing pain to be administered in increments no thicker than an eyelash. That kind of wheel.

The day before, a friend of mine had been impossible to console: he had received two pieces of terrible news that morning, he said, and the one he was willing to talk about involved a young teenage girl in South Africa – the daughter of a woman he used to work with – raped in her own room by three masked men. “You know, there’s this persistent myth that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Preferably dry sex.”

I wondered about the other piece of news, but said nothing. We were playing cards, one of those games where the jokers can steal any identity and the player who finishes with the lowest score wins. I was winning, and whistled under my breath.

2.
In my last dream before waking, I am trying to find a poetry reading in a restaurant basement. Raw sewage is oozing through the cracks in the floor and under the stairs, green, incredibly foul. The manager shrugs: the health inspector won’t come around for another two months, and anyway, the city floats on a river of shit and stale urine. I find the exit and take deep gulps of the alley’s gentrified air. Here’s some fancy brickwork, an old brass hitching post. Every passing hand rests briefly on its cool metal skin.

3.
The news isn’t good, almost by definition. Polar icecaps are melting; the Amazon is drying out. All across Siberia, methane gas percolates through the warming soil, suddenly unencumbered by a frozen ceiling. Millions of years of freeze-dried shit and corpses have a sudden date with the anaerobic rulers of the planet, whose patience and whose appetite are equally infinite.

The wheel has turned too far, it seems, and now the ligaments are beginning to snap. In the long-term forecast, there’s an 80 percent chance of the extinction of most multi-cellular life forms on earth. Our ancestors were cold and lonely and desperately afraid of their own extinction, and read in the heavens a promise of unlimited semen. Now we will be plenty warm, I bet. And life will continue without us, in whatever form; those who believe in biogenesis can take comfort in the thought of earth’s own bacteria seeding the stars.

I remember once as a kid, toward the end of January, putting three or four snowballs in the freezer for some reason. I found them six months later while trying to make room for blueberries, and it took me a few moments to recognize what they were. The snow had turned to lumps of ice, gray and lifeless: such a fragile crop, impossible to preserve.

How will we describe the snow to our great-grandchildren? It drifted down from the night sky like flour, we’ll say, or sometimes like a rain of flowers the color of light: little vajras, wheels with six spokes. It gave cover to mice and to the ugliest of wounds. It made us dream of oneness. Wasn’t it cold, they’ll ask, and we’ll say no, you could burrow into it as into a down comforter. Sometimes a ruffed grouse would burst from the snow right in front of you in the middle of a still morning. It changed by the day and by the hour, and when the sun came out you could see the shadow of the sky itself: blue, blue.

Robert Hass on poetry and activism

From the on-line environmental magazine Grist comes a brief but thought-provoking interview with California poet Robert Hass.

Q. You studied biology in college, but it seems like today colleges cast students as either science or literature people. In your class, do you find that people aren’t communicating between the two sides of their brain?

A. I think people do try to communicate between those two sides of their brain. I think part of the interest of the intelligent design/evolutionary biology debate is about how the implications of science talk to the rest of our feeling, affective selves. To try to figure out how to put those together is the fun of this class.

My partner, a science professor, gets the poetry people who are worried that they can’t get the science, and I get the science people who are worried they can’t do the poetry. So I’m sitting in my office with some really bright young people who can do neurobiology or astrophysics but say they can’t understand poetry. And I’m inclined to get down a poem off the shelf like Wordsworth’s sonnet, “All things that love the sun are out of doors,” and I say, what don’t you understand about that?

Can poetry save the world? Maybe – but it’s no substitute for activism, says Hass. In either case, we need to start by noticing what’s around us. I agree.

I found a longer, less focused interview with Hass, conducted right after his inaugural reading as Poet Laureate in 1997 and published in American Poetry Review, online here. At one point, Hass advances an argument that should be familiar to readers of this weblog:

I think that to praise or dispraise, to enchant or disenchant, both of which functions art has – you have to include a lot of the one if you’re going to do the other. I think poetry that says yes has to swallow great goblets of darkness; and poetry that says no has to say no in the face of the fact that there must be reasons why the poet has chosen to continue to live in order to say it. I always think in this connection of Monet because I read that his water lily paintings were begun as a response to reports he had read of the dead in the trenches in the first world war.

Grace Cavalieri: Have you used that in a poem?

Robert Hass: No I haven’t used it in a poem. I mean, I think it’s already there. It doesn’t need to be. But the reason those paintings seem to us so supremely great and not wallpaper is that they are full of the dead. They’re full of all those, all those colors, full of the colors of the bodies in the trenches as he imagined them. Poetry that praises the world has to have immense ballast.

Holes

If only the personal weren’t, as they say, so political. If only the person-holes called leaders were a bit less personable. If only the suction from those walking vacuums weren’t always so goddamn difficult to resist.

Autumn is the time for longing thoughts, they say; rapid change makes us yearn for stasis. It’s autumn, it’s raining, & I crave the familiarity of cliché. What is a cliché, after all, but an aborted proverb? One man’s culture of life is another man’s petri dish. (To say nothing of the women, of course.)

If only failure were not, as they say, an option. If misery really were capable of love, what loving company a miserable failure might find himself in. The great and powerful POTUS side-by-side with a scruffy, self-promoting documentary filmmaker: what fearful asymmetry! If only a mere Google bomb could blow the manhole cover off that septic stream of lies. But the lies are old news, and in the U.S.A., old news is no news – good news for those who stand to profit off the unstoppable buck, the bull market, the zero worship.

The rain started two hours before dawn while I was in the shower, so that when I stuck my damp head out the door, I heard the soft deliberate footfalls of a burglar in the grass, on the porch roof. Take all you want, I said – as if anything here were mine to part with in the first place.

Every morning I scan the headlines, shaping my lips & tongue unconsciously around the new-yet-strangely-familiar-&-comforting litany of other people’s misery. (I’m only a fully silent reader in company.) Earthquake, hurricane, I whisper, mudslide, flood. A school roof collapses like a sick joke on the heads of schoolchildren; an art museum is flattened by a floating casino. Whole towns are buried under suddenly wakeful, supposedly sacred mountains. Library collections turn gray & mushy in the mouths of their most thorough readers ever.

All that future, down the shit hole. All those centuries of incense & slow fasting.

What does it mean to be a lyric poet in times of widespread disaster & a global extinction crisis? What does it mean to cherish quietness, faced with the absolute silence of the null set? Words too easily succumb to a dervish vertigo. I am bone-tired of this present tense, its tightly wrapped present of tension, waiting for an epiphany that may be nothing like what we have ever imagined that we deserve. I am sick to death of the prayerful moment. I want to tell the wonder-junky in me, shut your goddamn slavering cake hole with some actual cake, for once. Fill your glistening eyes with some light-hearted miracle, some fancy contraption involving hidden wires & gaps in the fabric that earns a standing ovation from your pants. Get a real job. Consume. Obey.

Last month I lost my only set of keys & ever since, everywhere I look, there’s another keyhole right at eye-level. No peeping, now, I have to admonish myself. The world can go to hell, and maybe it will; a wrong thing never turns right. Someone lives in there, I have to think.
__________

With gratitude for the influence of Chris Clarke’s much more analytical series on The Anatomy of Bad News (here, here, here, and here, with more to come, I hope).

Chant for the Summit of the World Body

unaltered phrases from on-line news sources, via Google News

He wanted a real overhaul for the world body
An urgent overhaul of the world body
Poetically described the world body
A final text to move the world body
A harder line at the world body
Taking the message of Youth Upliftment to the world body
To breathe new life into the world body
To encourage and support the world body
To consider committing the world body
The Palestinians want the world body
President Bush called on the world body
The most sordid and shameful episode in the history of the world body
Washington’s relations with the world body
Would have been unthinkable for the world body
Admission into the world body
“Working methods” within the world body
Acceptance of help from the world body
A more strategic relationship with the world body
A particularly troubled time for the world body
Monday night among members of the world body
Committed to strengthening the world body
Enhancing the capacity of the world body
Reason enough to create the world body
The world body could take action
The world body has had past experiences
The world body is the prime instrument
The world body is possibly too democratic for its own good
The world body is supposed to print and oversee
A document enabling the world body
To undermine the effectiveness of the world body
It should have its own seat in the world body
A “Goodwill Ambassador” for the world body
Deviously appointed to the world body
A second-class citizen at the world body
Has yet to get approval from the world body
A horde of reforms for the world body
The Western Shoshone tribe has asked the world body
To tackle the problems facing the world body
Detrimental to the internal unity of the world body
World Rankings released by the world body
Findings that further tarnish the world body
Sweeping changes to the world body
What larger players have in mind for the world body
Taking Iran before the world body
The Islamic world in the world body
Endorsing the reshaping of the world body
Will also oblige the world body
To regain legitimacy for the world body
What future would await the world body?
The bleeding sometimes never seems to stop, according to the world body

Migration

Quarter till six. I’m sitting outside with my coffee and a brand new pocket notebook, in which I am writing the following words: A jet crosses the chest of Orion, dragging its roar half a sky behind it. Fog forms around me as I write, guessing at the lines, unsure of whether I have started this notebook with black or blue ink. Trucks are loud in the valley — I try to determine from the quality of the sound whether or not they are driving through thick fog.

Last night, I dreamed about finding my missing set of keys — they had been right where I usually keep them, and had simply been hiding from me each time I looked there before. Now, they were ready to be found. But other things remain lost. It seems that I am part of a group of pilgrims about to set off for New Orleans on foot, but I want to bow out and go by car instead because my glasses are in such bad shape. One of the lenses keeps popping out, and I’m afraid that if the frame breaks I won’t be able to get it repaired on the road. Even in the dream, I realize the foolishness of this anxiety. But I am quite nearsighted, and always feel terribly vulnerable without glasses.

We’re following one of New Orleans’ cemetery angels come to life, who is searching for her missing thumb and thinks that it might have been ‘borrowed’ by a hitchhiker desperate to get out of the city. Our plan: to comb the shoulders of every major road and highway between here and there. When we find the thumb, the angel will turn back to stone and will return to her station, directing traffic at the center of a vast necropolis. For now, she seems human enough — in fact, she has a bit of a pout. I want to find out if her wings smell of mildew, but she keeps her distance.

As the light strengthens, my handwritten words get smaller and straighter, falling into line. The stars fade. I hear the “wick wick wick” of migrating wood thrushes dropping down into the trees to rest and forage. They have thousands of miles yet to go. It makes me sad to think I won’t hear them sing again until next May.

Four nights of dream

I dream of beaten fields, whole landscapes cleansed of desire & pressed flat by an enormous iron. I start awake, not as if from a nightmare but from the ingestion of something too heavy, too incompatible with dreaming. I stumble downstairs & scan the latest headlines: people cutting holes in their attics, standing in water up to their necks. Whole towns smashed to rubble. There are rumors of bodies floating through the streets.

The next night, I dream of meeting my fetch, who resembles me in every way except that he seems to be a bit of a pedant & is not at all good-looking. We join forces to beat up my older brother, who is greatly offended. I wake to stories of gunfire & looting & the president surveying the damage from 20,000 feet.

In the following night’s dream, my nine-year-old niece gets a visit from herself as a five-year-old. They exchange spiteful words & withdraw to a safe distance, glaring. I wake & read about rapes and near-riots in the Superdome, mothers carrying dead children, children standing watch over dead grandparents, helpless to stop the bloating & the grim ministrations of rats.

Early the next morning, I find myself kneeling in my parent’s dining room beside the ghost of a young girl who grows steadily more visible as we talk. I casually touch the black skin of her arm. She feels solid, alive, she giggles & chatters like any five-year-old. “What is your name?” I ask softly. She pretends to mishear. “Her name is Lucy,” she says, holding up her blond doll. “I’m going to go stay in her house now. She lives in a big ol’ mansion on a hill with columns out front.”

My mother watches anxiously from the sofa. “Were those your parents we saw disappearing in the middle of the field?” she wonders. A look of panic crosses the girl’s face. She grips my hand tightly, & I wake. I get a shower & sit outside in a folding canvas chair under the stars, taking small sips of black coffee, then tilting my head all the way back. The Pleiades stand high overhead; Mars glimmers to their right, a bloodshot eye. Meteors flare one after the other & quickly gutter in the dark waters, whichever route they take toward the horizon. I sit breathing in the honeysuckle fragrance of wild tobacco – also called white shooting-star, after the shape of the blossoms – & listen to the crickets stuttering toward dawn.
__________

My Paul Zweig reading project is, I hope, only temporarily stalled. I have been following the news closely, for once, and busying myself with many distractions. The title here plagiarizes Natsume Soseki’s 1908 collection of linked stories translated as Ten Nights of Dream. I’d love to hear from readers who may have had similarly disturbing dreams over the past week.

Remembering New Orleans

What is there to say about the destruction of New Orleans that hasn’t already been said elsewhere? As with the 9/11 attacks, I feel somewhat disconnected from what the rest of the country is experiencing, due to my inability to view video images of the tragedy (no T.V., only a dial-up connection to the Internet). I thought that Cornelia Dean and Andrew C. Revkin, writing for The New York Times, did an excellent job of encapsulating the environmental context. Among the blogs I read regularly, Whiskey Bar did the best job of summing things up (see also the comprehensive links list of organizations involved in hurricane relief), and Creature of the Shade offered the invaluable perspective of an urban geographer on the question of whether the city will survive. Creek Running North has had a couple of good posts on the looting – or is it salvage? – to which I can only add that, with 28 percent of its population below poverty level and one of the most brutal police forces in the country, the storm of looting was almost as inevitable as the hurricane itself.

On a more wistful note, a New Orleans reminiscence in 3rd House Journal takes the prize for most lyrical image. “After 10 days in New Orleans, I flew directly to Colorado Springs for a work conference,” Leslee writes, “and when I opened my suitcase steam came out. New Orleans travels with you.”

I have only been to New Orleans once, and most of that time was spent sleeping, so I have no real reminiscences to share. But I think it’s worth reflecting for a few moments on how much we collectively owe this city. Jazz has been called, rightly, America’s greatest gift to the world, and I think it embodies our ideals of freedom, adaptability and individual self-expression better than any other native art-form. That the birthplace of jazz has been dealt this kind of blow at the very same time that America’s other great contribution to world civilization – our national parks system, the first in the world – is under attack, makes me sad beyond words.

One often sees New Orleans described as “America’s most unique city.” This is a polite way of saying that it was one of the few cities in America where, I gather, it was possible to have fun. Street culture was actively encouraged, and the annual party known as Mardi Gras drew hedonists and misfits from all over the country. Why? Because outside of Louisiana, the idea of a high old time in virtually every town and city in this law-and-order-obsessed country is to reproduce the entire civic order in a slow procession through the streets: a parade. Woo-hoo. New Orleans offered a valuable counter-example, as well as a link to pre-Christian religious traditions of both African and European provenance. In vernacular religions the world over, annual, week-long festivals offer a ritualized vision of the world turned upside-down – an age-old image for the spirit world and a valuable reminder of the distance between that world and our own. But the United States was founded upon a different sort of idealism, one that sought to actualize heaven in the here-and-now – that whole, utopian, shining-city-on-a-hill bullshit. The inevitable result has been severe hubris and hypocrisy, social repression and a relentless war against wild nature.

It’s tempting to try and imagine how things might have been different if, instead of putting all its efforts into keeping the Mississippi in a straightjacket, the Army Corps had instead tried to apply a kind of Mardi Gras philosophy. Annual, controlled flooding of the Mississippi – on a much bigger scale than the freshwater diversions currently permitted – might still be able to restore coastal wetlands and reduce the storm surge from future hurricanes. In place of our traditional view in which order – meaning top-down control – is all-good, and chaos – bottom-up insurrection – is all-bad, we need to learn how to value an interplay between the two. If we continue to resist achieving some kind of equilibrium, in the form of social, economic and environmental sustainability, nature will do it for us, and the results will not be pretty.

O.K., I do remember this: a slow, night-time drive through a wide-awake city, and the immense civic pride shown by the African American taxi driver. He swung past one of the cemeteries, explaining why all the coffins were stored in above-ground crypts. When he found out I was a writer, he enthused about local author Anne Rice and her publicity stunt to promote her latest vampire novel: she had herself borne through the streets in an open coffin. They say that jazz originally sprang from the famous New Orleans funeral, in which the slow march to the cemetery switches to an up-tempo dance tune to accompany the mourners back home. Here’s hoping New Orleans can dance back from the crypt once again.

UPDATE: Before you pooh-pooh my conclusion, read this (found here). It very much fits what Jarrett wrote in the comments: “New Orleans — with its ability to produce wonderful stories like this one without having anything like a coherent local economy — may be more performance than place, which is cause for hope. Performances are easier to put back together than places are.”

This I don’t believe

Recently, a couple of the blogs I read featured statements of personal belief. Rachel Barenblatt of Velveteen Rabbi wrote what she described as a personal credo, although with a few caveats:

I don’t want to risk misunderstanding, or to lose nuance in the attempt to speak too plainly about matters which don’t lend themselves to language. At the same time, I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good; just because I can’t be sure of expressing myself perfectly is no reason not to try. My final caveat is that I’m not sure it’s possible for a credo to be comprehensive — otherwise it would take lifetimes to write, let alone recite!

Then Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner, in a break with his unwritten rule against personal essays that aren’t related to the blog’s Middlewestern focus, published a somewhat darker statement, the greater part of which seems to consist of caveat.

I believe this as firmly as a righteous Christian believes in Christ, that some twenty-five billion years from now the universe will collapse back upon itself, will congeal and compact and become again the speck from which the Big Bang erupted, and everything that we know, everything that we have cherished, will be lost. That I have lived will mean nothing then. Nothing I have written will survive. Both the good I have done and the pain I have caused will have evaporated as surely as the wind blows away my spoken words, blows away the scent of the decaying world.

I was reminded of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” feature – not that we are likely to hear views as challenging as Rachel’s or Tom’s on the airwaves any time soon.

Much as I enjoyed reading these statements of belief, however, I felt little inclination to follow their lead, and at first, I wasn’t quite sure why. Rachel’s “Credo” had been sparked by a post at not native fruit, where Karen Mattern penned what could only be termed an anti-creed screed. Karen talks about her strong impulse to escape what she considers the excessively credal focus of her native Catholicism. In my case, though, I can hardly claim to be reacting against my upbringing. My parents always encouraged us kids to think for ourselves, in an environment that was neither hostile toward religion nor favored one religion over another. We took turns reading and discussing the Bible and (eventually) other sacred texts at regular family religion meetings, and all views were welcome as long as we could argue persuasively for them. (I remember how much this used to bother my conservative Methodist grandmother. “Why don’t you take those kids to church and teach them what to think?” she once snapped at my mother.)

The upshot? One of my brothers had a conversion experience and joined a Christian church, while the other remains indifferent to the claims of organized religion. For my part, as readers of this blog may have sensed, despite a strong interest in religion, I have never been able to commit to a single one. To me, this is like going into a Baskin-Robbins and being told that, whichever of the 32 flavors you pick, forever after you can only order that flavor.* I’ve become something of an intellectual chameleon: I change colors to match whatever I am reading at the moment. “Via Negativa”? Perhaps it’s to preserve my own psychic health that I prefer to let my most strongly held convictions take a negative form.

Negative propositions have played a pivotal role in my thinking since at least the age of fifteen, when I read Masanobu Fukuoka’s lyrical book about natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution, with its central insight that humanity knows nothing. Armed with this conviction, the author says, he was led to pioneer a productive and ecologically sound method of farming which, in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, approaches each problem by asking, “How about not trying this? How about not trying that?” Following nature meant, above all, cultivating one’s mind to appreciate the way things tend to happen on their own, and making as few modifications to these natural processes as possible. As an enthusiastic vegetable gardener who had recently published an article in Organic Gardening magazine entitled “An Experimental Garden,” I was enormously surprised and impressed.

The translator’s footnotes led me to Daoism, in the form of D. C. Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, and the opening verse changed the way I thought about metaphysical questions for good.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

Though I might now prefer a slightly different translation – one that treats Dao more as a verb than a noun – Lau’s translation still seems designed for maximum impact on the worldview of an essence-obsessed Westerner.

Shortly thereafter I discovered some of D.T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen, and began my acquaintance with the Buddhist theory of the self (or rather, no-self) – still the only psychological tradition I can claim any familiarity with. Seven or eight years later, a chance reference in another book about growing food (I think maybe one of Wendell Berry’s, but I can’t recall for sure) led me to Peter Kropotkin, and the great, sadly misunderstood and under-appreciated tradition of Western anarchism. Kropotkin’s views dovetailed with, and greatly expanded upon, political insights I’d gleaned from philosophical Daoism. Along the way I also grappled with such books as Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Once I got beyond the shock of realizing that “the emperor has no clothes,” I started turning the questions back on myself, trying to get to the root of our shared assumptions about how the world works, or ought to work. Eventually, I even rejected anarchism, reasoning that as an anarchist my first duty was to free my mind from a subservient relationship to a set of received opinions.

I resisted making a systematic study of any of these influences, believing that insights imported from others are never truly earned. The point is not to be able to claim ownership of an idea, whatever that might mean, but to be able to appreciate its full impact. Plus, I enjoy playing around with ideas; I am far from sharing Buddhism’s disdain for the “monkey of the mind.” Given any new idea, I tend to immediately consider its antithesis, and then try to judge how large the apparent gulf between thesis and antithesis really is, and whether it might be bridged. That virtually reflexive impulse to counter with “How about not?” has proven to be enormously useful to me. I thought it might be fun to list a few of my favorite contrarian stating-points, to give my readers a better idea of where the heck I’m coming from.

Here’s the caveat. Just as the articles of faith in a regular, positivist credo are things one aspires to realize more fully in one’s day-to-day thoughts and actions, so are the non-articles in my anti-creed. The fact that I list them here doesn’t mean that I have fully absorbed their impact or worked out all their implications. They are non-articles in the sense that the form they happen to take here is completely arbitrary. In fact, merely allowing them to coalesce in this fashion may damage their utility for me, because, above all, I view these as starting points for reflection rather than objects of intellectual assent. In no particular order, then:

I don’t believe that “life” has “meaning” in the sense of some knowable purpose. To think otherwise is to reduce a multiplicity, which at best can be experienced as a gestalt, to a limited and tool-like shadow-life.

I don’t believe in the idea of progress, whether in personal, social or evolutionary history. In the long run, as my friend Tom points out, we are all a null set. Salvation occurs in the present or not at all (see next-to-last non-article, below).

I don’t believe that coercion, punishment or retribution can ever be anything but regrettable. Killing wild animals for meat or killing another human being in self-defense may be necessary, but imposing one’s will on another is never of any benefit to the other. It is a criminal’s empathy for his/her former victim, not punishment, that brings about remorse and (with luck) efforts at restitution. True justice works to restore harmony, not to perpetuate disharmony.

I don’t believe in hierarchies. While they may sometimes serve a limited, heuristic purpose, hierarchical structures, methodologies and ideologies are little more than extensions of ego, and work to hamper the freedom (political, intellectual, and spiritual) of those who use them as well as those whom they seek to define.

I don’t believe in ownership. The ultimately fruitless attempt to possess is nothing but an enlargement of ego, harming the would-be owner as well as the being, object, idea or portion of space over which ownership is asserted. (The concept of God is most useful as a way of conceptualizing that portion of experience which is fully sovereign and beyond ownership: to a faithful monotheist, virtually everything.)

I don’t believe in essence. “Being” is a falsely reified byproduct of an Indo-European grammatical construct, the copulative verb. This is not an argument for nihilism, because “is not” is simply a derivation of “is.” (The Buddhist concept of Emptiness is most useful as a way to remember the contingent and provisional nature of all things.)

I don’t believe in a unique and singular self. The quest for liberation becomes immeasurably simpler when one realizes that there is nothing to liberate (see also next-to-last non-article below). Whether or not we experience ourselves as unitary individuals is conditioned by culture: many traditional societies have the belief that a person is made up of multiple souls and spirits, for instance. For psychological health, probably only the experience of wholeness is necessary.

I don’t believe in the alienation of subject from object. While discriminatory reasoning is a powerful tool with many obvious applications, those who employ it should beware against its unlimited extension; they risk becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice. (By contrast, the “logic of participation” at the root of magical/animist views is vital to the creation and appreciation of art, music, love – everything that makes life worth living.)

I don’t believe in a mundane level of reality. Life may appear mundane much of the time, but that is because we are not fully awake to it – and/or because we are unwittingly conspiring to perpetuate collective delusions and multiply suffering, our own as well as others’, in the pursuit of ego-gratification. (The non-mundane may take the form of sacrality, comic absurdity, or anything in between.)

I don’t believe in proselytization. For persuasion to remain non-coercive, it must stop short of explicit or implicit threats aimed at the other’s spiritual well-being. Invitations to join a faith community should only ever be offered in a spirit of genuine friendship; otherwise, efforts to increase the numbers of the faithful amount to little more than empty power plays (and will lead to endless schisms).

I don’t believe in the pursuit of personal salvation, liberation or enlightenment. If you make your own advancement a priority, your ability to empathize is fatally compromised – and without empathy, there can be no true understanding. Besides, advancement – a version of “progress” – is an illusion: there is nowhere to advance to beyond the present moment. Liberation seems to be a natural human instinct, just like the instinct for food or sex, but as with these other desires, until we are willing to abandon it at any moment to serve others without a second thought, we remain imprisoned, mired in egotism.

I don’t believe in static creeds, ideologies, or other self-consistent systems of thought. A god that requires assent to propositions as a pre-condition for salvation is no God, but a tyrant. And even for the godless, I think, when the pursuit of intellectual consistency starts to feel compulsive, it’s time to stop. Abstractions are masters incapable of mercy. Repeat after Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I embrace multitudes.”

O.K. that’s enough! I could probably split some of these up or think of one or two others, but these are the monkey bars on which my thoughts most often play.
__________

*Although, in point of fact, I always do get the same flavor of ice cream wherever I go: mint chocolate chip.

Owed

This entry is part 3 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the third poem from his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See the introduction to yesterday’s post for details.

God’s Ledger
by Paul Zweig

You gave me what I didn’t want
And taught me to love it. You fed me
Sweet food, and killed each painful cell…

[Remainder of poem removed 8-23-05]

* * * *

Anti-Psalm

The Lord is my venture capitalist; I shall not wonder.
My mouth scarcely shapes itself into an Owe
& His pen is already busy adding zeroes.
He underwrites my need for better reception.
Who knew I harbored such complex involucres?

He asks for nothing difficult in return:
there’s no soul in receivership, no pain that doesn’t pass —
hard currency of that heaven they harp about.
I am full, full. Beggars get fat on my crumbs.

He gives me something to quench the flames
well in advance of setting me on fire.
He asks for nothing, believe me.
He takes a loss.

The Great Without

Ninety degrees in the sun. “My legs are just covered in prickly heat,” my mother complains. “In what?” “Prickly heat. These little red spots on the skin.” “Shouldn’t you call them ‘heat prickles’?” “I don’t know, that’s what my mother always said.” It’s from her, too, that my mom got her intolerance for heat. Nanna couldn’t sweat.

*

My mother had an interesting conversation with one of the Amish women where she buys vegetables. They were talking about strategies to survive the heat without air conditioning, and the Amish woman – middle-aged and unmarried, as so many in her society choose to remain – said, “Do you still get hot flashes? Not me! I got a hysterectomy.” She strode confidently back and forth across the gravel driveway in her bare feet, helping my mom carry her groceries to the car. “How can you walk so quickly on those sharp stones?” “Oh, I’m used to it. The gravel feels so cool!”

*

We were driving over to my uncle’s house yesterday afternoon for a family gathering. The conversation turned to turtles: how so many species in Southeast Asia are being decimated by hunting for the international black market. As quickly as new species are documented by scientists, it seems, they’re winking out of existence. “What’s the demand?” “Oh, Chinese medicine, as usual,” Mom said. “You know, Chinese men and their, you know.” We knew. “Sometimes it seems like everything in the world is an aphrodisiac as far as Chinese men are concerned!”

I thought about protesting the unfairness of this generalization – in fact, endangered animal products are put to a variety of uses in traditional Chinese medicine. While turtle eggs are prized as an aphrodisiac, turtle shells are thought to “nourish yin and subdue yang, and to soften hardness and disperse nodules.” And as anyone with an email account must recognize, an obsession with penis size and performance is hardly limited to the Chinese. But I was fascinated by the philosophical implications of world-as-aphrodisiac.

*

A couple hours later, I was thumbing through the latest issue of National Geographic at my uncle’s house. There’s a feature article on Zheng He, the Ming dynasty imperial eunuch who led a fleet on several voyages around the Indian Ocean and down the coast of East Africa. I had been aware of this since taking a Chinese history course in college, but I hadn’t realized just how massive the fleet had been: 300 ships carrying 30,000 men. All the ships sailed by Columbus and Vasco da Gama in their initial voyages 80 years later could have been lined up side by side on the deck of a single one of Zheng He’s ships – the largest wooden vessels ever built.

I realized as I read the article that one reason for my prior lack of interest in Zheng He’s exploits stemmed from sexist prejudice. The simple fact that he lacked a penis made me unconsciously discount the claims of his greatness. But it was sexism – the desire to safeguard the “purity” of the harem and guarantee the paternity of all royal sons – that perpetuated the tradition of royal eunuchs in the first place, and it was sexism that led Chinese emperors to continually discount the possibility that court eunuchs might have ambitions of their own.

Zheng He was a Central Asian from what is now Xinjiang Province, captured in battle at the age of 11 and castrated at 13. He rose to prominence as the military strategist for a prince who eventually usurped the throne to become the third Ming emperor, Yongle, in 1402. The principal purpose of Yongle’s grand maritime expeditions was to display the superior cultural and military prowess of China in general and his reign in particular. He ended up bankrupting the government. As the Wikipedia puts it,

[U]nlike the later naval expeditions conducted by European nations, the Chinese treasure ships appear to have been doomed in the long run (at least in the eyes of economic determinists) because the voyages lacked any economic motive. They were primarily conducted to increase the prestige of the emperor and the costs of the expeditions and of the return gifts provided to foreign royalty and ambassadors more than offset the benefit of any tribute collected. Thus when China’s governmental finances came under pressure… funding for the naval expeditions melted away. In contrast, by the 16th century, most European missions of exploration made enough profit from the resulting trade and seizure of native land/resources to become self-financing, allowing them to continue regardless of the condition of the state’s finances.

Emperor Yongle died young, and the immense monolith he had intended to erect over his tomb remains where it was abandoned, next to the parent rock – too large to move. Zheng He, his achievements downplayed by the official chronicles, assumed a position of great prominence in Chinese folk cosmology. Said to be seven feet tall in life, he was deified after death and has temples dedicated to his worship in China and all over Southeast Asia. Not bad for a religious Muslim who made the pilgrimage to Mecca during one of his voyages.

*

The National Geographic website includes a brief article about imperial eunuchs by Elizabeth Snodgrass that is worth quoting in full.

Zheng He was only one among hundreds of eunuchs in powerful positions at the Ming court. Since at least the Zhou dynasty (circa 1045-256 B.C.), official records document eunuchs in the service of the Chinese emperor. By the fall of the Ming dynasty in A.D. 1644 there were more than 100,000 eunuchs living in Beijing, reports Dorothy Perkins in the Encyclopedia of China.Why so many? At first eunuchs were in large supply because captured enemies–boys and men–were often castrated, probably to ensure the end of their bloodline. The procedure was high-risk, involving excision of both penis and testicles. Many died from the operation or complications afterward, but those who lived often became workers in the imperial harem or the harems of high officials. Later, castration was used specifically as a way to gain employment at the palace, and courtiers were even required to furnish the Manchu palace with sons to be castrated. For this elective surgery, more care was taken with the health of the patient–it is claimed that only about two in a hundred cases were fatal.

Since the eunuchs were often the only males in close daily contact with the emperor and top government officials, they gained vast political power and were able to sway the policies of the day. The Confucian bureaucrats who ran the government were in constant struggle with the eunuchs for supremacy. Over time, the eunuchs took part in imperial power plays at the highest levels, sometimes even effecting a change of emperor or running the show from behind the throne. Their power waxed and waned throughout the different dynasties, running strong in the Tang, weaker in the Song, and again quite strong in the Yuan (Mongol) and Ming dynasties.

The last eunuch to serve a Chinese emperor was Sun Yaoting, who served Henry Puyi, the last emperor. Sun Yaoting passed away in 1996.

A longer online essay, Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China, by Mary M. Anderson, explores the political and cultural underpinnings at greater length.

Down through the centuries of China’s dynastic rule, officials repeatedly memorialized the Dragon Throne, pleading that eunuch interference in state affairs be curbed. However, almost none recommended that the ancient eunuch system be abolished. This is but one indication of how deeply ingrained in Chinese thinking was the custom that allowed only sexless males to serve the Imperial Presence, the ladies of his royal family, and his thousands of concubines, all amassed together in the “Great Within” behind forbidden palace doors.It should be pointed out that Chinese dynastic histories were all written by mandarins, the educated elite who, as a class, despised the palace eunuchs. Mandarins alone were eligible to hold office in the bureaucracy, the “Great Without.” …

Much speculation exists as to why most monarchs of China so trusted their eunuchs – one emperor praised them as “creatures docile and loyal as gelded animals” – when bodily mutilation was universally abhorred in orthodox Chinese culture. Loss of limb or castration rendered a man unfit to worship before the carved wooden spirit tablets to which the ancestral souls descended during memorial services. More deplorable still, a eunuch, since he was incapable of siring sons, had no one to perform the obligatory sacrificial rites for his own soul after death. Thus, one who suffered this most shameful of deformities was deemed outside the pale of Chinese society.

The belief was prevalent that a castrato, since he would always be childless, would not covet political power and position to pass it to sons, according to the Chinese tradition. Similarly, he would have no need to accumulate riches by selling inside palace information or stealing the treasure and tribute that flowed to the imperial coffers. Yet history repeatedly proved this faith in eunuch passivity and loyalty unfounded. (Corrected for scanning errors.)

The largest junks in Zheng He’s fleet were called the Treasure Ships. Treasure (bao) was also the euphemism most commonly used for the eunuch’s severed genitalia. Anderson’s article unfortunately translates bao as “precious,” which immediately makes me think of Tolkein’s Gollum:

The severed parts, euphemistically called the pao, meaning the “precious,” were preserved in a hermetically sealed vessel, and were highly valued by the eunuch. They were always placed on a high shelf to symbolize that the owner should rise to high rank. The eunuch also treasured his “precious” because, to be promoted to a higher grade, he was obliged to first display his emasculated parts and be reexamined by the chief eunuch. If his “Precious” should be lost or stolen, at promotion time he had to buy one from the eunuch clinic, or he could borrow or rent one from another eunuch. It was also vital that the eunuch’s organs be placed in his coffin at his death in the hope of hoodwinking the gods of the underworld into believing that he was a complete man: otherwise he was doomed to appear in the next world as a she-mule.

*

Incomplete, they say of a man without a penis or a woman without a man. But to a hermaphrodite, we’re all missing something.

Source of seed, they say, but the seed forms only in the womb.

Source of power, they say. Tell it to the mules.

Thoroughly pure, they said of eunuchs in imperial China who had been castrated before the age of ten. But no man can win a pissing contest with a nine-year-old.

Recover your manhood, the ads promise, but we will never again have such erections as we did when we were boys and it didn’t matter.

Oyster, tiger penis, rhinocerous horn. But only for the pre-pubescent can the whole world become an aphrodisiac, shimmering, complete.