Personal/Political – Page 28

August 21, 2005December 13, 2013 by Dave Bonta

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.

August 14, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

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.

July 21, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

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.

July 8, 2005December 8, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The obvious

If I have one major talent, I like to tell people, it is in pointing out the obvious. After the Oklahoma City bombing, I said to anyone who would listen: Of course fertilizer is a deadly weapon. Imagine a million bombs like this going off every day in the once-living soils of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, India, the Philippines. How inconvenient that McVeigh and Nichols appeared so white & ordinary, so like us.

The Oklahoma City Memorial: School is out, but still we come to call roll. This could be anywhere. The even ranks of identical chairs bear testimony to the discipline, rectitude and undiscriminating universality of the bomb’s unholy curriculum.

September 11, 2001: For a week afterwards, with every airport shut down, the skies over North America were the clearest they’d been in decades. Our ears grew almost accustomed to the silence. In the woods & in the fields we could hear small things: a snail chewing on a leaf, mud cracking as it dried, the necks of sunflowers creaking in unison as the sun made its unrepeatable way across their sky.

London bombings: The panic passed quickly, survivors said. They began talking, analyzing, coordinating. Those who could walk, walked: burned or bloody, dark with soot, missing an eye or an eardrum, perhaps, but proceeding with great deliberation up into the streets, which by that time had become virtually as foreign as they.

Vietnam Memorial: Solid stone comforts in a way no living tissue can. In the space between the engraved letters, our faces lack the depth & color we are accustomed to from ordinary mirrors. Maya Lin has the clearest mind of any American artist since John Cage. All along the black cliff-face one can see visitors approach, hesitate, extend a trembling hand, sometimes a forehead.

July 7, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Underground

The agent of God’s wrath rolls a ginger candy from one side of his mouth to the other and steps out through the sliding doors just before they close. He is not wearing gloves or sunglasses. You could not pick him out of a lineup. The briefcase that he placed with such great gentleness between the feet of several other passengers in the over-crowded subway car is an entirely ordinary briefcase; there is nothing to suggest that it might be capable of opening & opening & opening. He is one of a half million souls who will return another day, God willing, & will fold his newspaper carefully in order to avoid intruding upon his seat mates, reading the sports pages, the celebrity gossip, the updates on the manhunt for those who forfeit every claim to continued membership in the human race. This morning, he takes the stairs up to the street. A woman going the other way gives him the oddest look.

July 7, 2005May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Rice pudding

“Arroz con leche” – rice pudding – is the name of a popular Latin American children’s song and game. Children link hands in a circle and dance around a boy or girl who stands in the middle. The circling children sing the first two or three verses and the child in the middle sings the response (“Con éste, sí, con éste, no,”) while choosing someone from the circle to “wed.” They then switch places and the game repeats. The song has a number of variants. Here are two of them.

Arroz con leche, me quiero casar
con un mexicano que sepa cantar.

El hijo del rey me manda un papel,
me manda decir que me case con el.

Con éste, sí,
con éste, no,
con este mero
me caso yo.

Rice with milk, I want to marry
a Mexican who knows how to sing.

The king’s son sent me an order,
sent me word that I must marry him.

With this one, I do,
with this one, I don’t,
with this ordinary guy
I tie the knot.

Arroz con leche, me quiero casar
con una señorita/viudita de San Nicolás,

que sepa coser, que sepa contar,
que sepa abrir la puerta para ir jugar.

Yo soy la viudita, del barrio del rey,
me quiero casar y no encuentro con quien.

Con éste, sí,
con éste, no,
contigo, mi vida,
me casaré yo.

Rice with milk, I want to marry
a young woman/widow from San Nicolas

who knows how to sew, who knows how to count,
who knows how to go outside and play.

I am a widow from the king’s neighborhood,
I want to marry, but I never meet anyone.

With this one, I do,
with this one, I don’t,
with you, my dear,
I’ll tie the knot.

I suppose rice and milk were selected for their bridal colors, but also because rice pudding is a sweet dish in which the two main ingredients are thoroughly blended. Further speculation on the symbolism would rob this simple poem of its charm.

The game makes me think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. What at first blush seems like a reinforcement of dominant social values may actually end up subverting them. The attitude toward marriage is light-hearted and thoroughly polyamorous: by the end of the game, presuming nobody cheats and picks someone who is already “married,” everyone will be wedded to everyone else. The circle permits no hierarchies, no exclusivity.

It occurs to me it’s probably just as well we don’t have a game like this in Anglo-American culture – at least, not at such a young and innocent age. (Spin the Bottle comes later, I think.) How demoralizing it would be if one were the last to be chosen!

But perhaps Latin American kids don’t learn to be competitive at such a young age. One of the most popular Anglo circle games for the five-and-under set – always supervised by an adult – involves leaving someone out, over and over, in a survival of the fittest: Musical Chairs. One can probably tell a lot about the differences between the two cultures by comparing these two games.

Of course, being an uptight Protestant sort, holding hands was never my thing. I remember how I hated it when our first grade teacher made us line up in pairs and hold hands every time we left the classroom. It was so much better in nursery school, where everyone held onto a knot in a big, long rope and we went outside and walked all around like a human centipede.
__________

See also here for translations of Chinese nursery rhymes, plus two of my own invention.

July 2, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Washing the lettuce

It is said that Plato once came upon Diogenes the Kynic washing wild lettuce for his supper. “If you had paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t be reduced to washing lettuce,” said the philosopher. “If you had learned to wash lettuce, you wouldn’t have had to pay court to Dionysius,” replied the Kynic.

Diogenes believed in direct, unconventional responses rather in the manner of a Tang Dynasty Zen master. Once, when someone tried to convince him of the merits of Plato’s philosophy of Ideas, he squatted down and took a shit.

Once, on a sea voyage, Diogenes was captured by pirates who took him to Crete and put him on sale at the slave market. The auctioneer asked him whether he had any marketable talents. “Yes,” he said, “I excel at giving orders. Sell me to someone who needs a master.” It is said that a man called Xeniades was so impressed by this, he purchased him to tutor his children. Diogenes was soon in control of the man’s entire household. Years later, living in his tub, he used to deride rulers as slaves to their people.

Someone once asked Diogenes why it is that people give alms to beggars, who do little to deserve it, and not to philosophers, who perform such valuable services for all humanity. “Everyone expects that they themselves might someday be reduced to beggary,” Diogenes observed, “but no one ever expects to be reduced to philosophizing.”

July 1, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Abdul-Walid of Acerbia

“Amnesia is the soul of wit.” – Abdul-Walid

On the orders of its unelected leader, the beleaguered posts of Acerbia are about to undergo a Structural Adjustment Program. There is no Universal Declaration on Blogging Rights, no legal basis for charges of blogicide.

“I am the state,” Louis XIV famously declared. Abdul-Walid recently entertained a similar delusion, equating the contemplated termination of his blog and all its contents with suicide.

But at other times and in other contexts, the Acerbian dictator has been one of the blogosphere’s staunchest defenders of textual autonomy. He has been known to reprint other bloggers’ posts without their advance permission – tolerated under the lax laws that govern the blogosphere – and sometimes has gone so far as to change their shape, once even editing out lines he didn’t like and briefly withholding attribution. Soon thereafter, he quoted Pascal with favor:

Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, ‘My book,’ ‘My commentary,’ ‘My history,’ etc. They resemble middle-class people who have a house of their own, and always have ‘My house’ on their lips. They would do better to say, ‘Our book,’ ‘Our commentary,’ ‘Our history,’ etc., because there is in them usually more of other people’s than their own.

So is this the end for our beloved cities of the plain? Will their zealous ruler consign them to fire and brimstone, blind to the plight of the righteous few? You bet your booty.

Innominate. I play the tic-tac-toe with my tongue: I-No-Mi-Nate. It is one of those fabulous words, like “eponymous,” a word that testifies to itself, a word that hides behind itself. Or, like Lolita, or opolopo; words that entertain the mouth.The surface of Os innominatum wends deliriously: a gentle rise on a broad Iliac plain suddenly leads to a ridge which gives way to a volcanic crater, and a pair of mismatched wings surrounding a circular canal and subtending sheer cliffs. It is a prodigal shape, beaten every which way for pure functionality, bearing not a single wasted spur.

Word has it, however, that all the inhabitants have been airlifted out and have been granted refugee status elsewhere – most, in the shape-shifting way of web denizens, in multiple locations. Soon enough they will learn the bleak truth behind one of Abdul-Walid’s own apothegms, You have been sentenced to life outside prison, but this is harsher judgment than you think.

And Abdul-Walid himself?

As they pay their bill, and get up to leave, the older of the two is heard to say:”Insomnia. But I don’t count sheep when I can’t sleep. I count corpses.”

April 19, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Confessions of a semi-professional misanthrope

1. I would’ve liked to be a charlatan, to cure the incurable despite myself & the spooky footlights that would’ve come & gone, turning my cheeks into sudden caverns. I could’ve learned how to capture & breed the small mice of fear. I’d have had a riverboat & floated upstream on the tide, under the sycamores. I’d have told each client to be patient while I made a careful, horizontal incision all around the skin of a pomegranate, then eased it open, revealing who knows what mucilaginous gossip to feed an infinitely malleable appetite for lies.

2. The woman at the cookout says things that no one believes, not even us strangers. She tells us she’s already eaten. She says she & her husband are leaving the United States for some place civilized, some place where more of the people think the way they do, keep their needs within bounds. The campfire makes her young husband’s eyebrows dance like an elf’s; even his smile is eldritch. Her own smile is extremely brief, like an involuntary twitch she has labored to suppress. We talk about music & the pleasures of silence. “I have to have something on all the time when I’m alone,” she says softly. “I guess I don’t like my own company very much.” The night grows cool & the firewood quickly runs out. Everyone gets up to leave, bowing to each other’s silhouette in the darkness & expressing mutual gratitude, warm regards.

3. Call it natural sound if you want, I said, or call it silence: more & more, this is the soundtrack of pleasure for me. I hear music whether I want to or not. Thoughts rise to the surface & burst, pretty little bubbles. I stand outside in the middle of the driveway until my freshly barbered head grows cold. Above, the usual glitter. I try to imagine all the busy little lives going on underground, in the forest litter or in hollow trees. I go back in my house & shut both doors as quietly as I can. If this is loneliness, my friends, it tastes delicious!

4. I do enjoy the company of my fellow misanthropes – preferably one at a time. And on rare occasions when I’m drunk I play loud music to cancel out the unaccustomed roar inside my head.

5. I am still haunted by stories of those child soldiers forced at gunpoint to execute their own parents, then fed a steady diet of drugs & made to rape other children until acts of violence came to seem as natural & urgent as eating, or voiding the bowels. Their leader was a portly, ebullient man who taught them how to cut off the hands of villagers without killing them. At first, the idea was to prevent them from voting or defending themselves, but the children took to it with a special relish – and who am I, said Papa Sankoh, to deny them their pay? From hands they branched out to feet, ears, lips – all of the body’s most delicate instruments. If one cannot go to war against love itself, surely this was the next best thing.

6. Horror movies bore me. They’re like elaborate practical jokes we play upon ourselves. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out – flaccid penises that suck rather than spurt, vaginas with teeth. Big deal. I’d rather hear about the woman who married a bear, or why coyote’s eyes are yellow. Tell me about the time a snake almost swallowed the sun.

7. The brown tree snake in Guam. Kudzu in the American South. Nightcrawlers in the North Woods. These are only the most catastrophic of our slithering doppelgangers. Upon thy belly… Dust thou shalt eat… I will put enmity between thee and the woman. Who are we to deny the Lord His pay?

8. Beetles by the hundreds & the thousands, coming out of the walls. They crawl everywhere. I brush them from my beard, the back of my neck. Sometimes they bite. By the end of the winter, the house reeks of them. In my dreams, the floor heaves & cracks with their huddled masses. In their native Asia they winter in white cliffs; here, a white house or barn draws them like a beacon. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! But they are far more than just a nuisance. Some entomologists believe that dozens of ladybird beetle species native to the eastern United States have already gone extinct, unable to compete – their numbers too low, their habits insufficiently aggressive.

9. We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have. He is. This is authentic horror, the only kind that will matter in the end.

10. Call me Ishmael, then. I am a charlatan; how could it be otherwise? But better that, I say, than the unconscious & unconscionable sorcery of markets & bosses. Follow me, & we will both be lost – I promise. Salvation exists in the present or it doesn’t exist. We will thirst forever.

March 31, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Miracle man

in the words of Bill Tierney, street protestor and professional interrogator

Terri is not dead
until she’s dead. I tried
to be nuanced and culturally aware
but the suspects didn’t break.
They did not break! I’m here
so our civilization beats theirs. Now
what are you willing to do to win?
We’re not going to go home.

You are the interrogators, you
are the ones who have to get
the information from the Iraqis.
What do you do?
That word torture.
I’m here to win.
Terri is not dead until she’s dead.

You immediately think, That’s not me.
But are we litigating this war or fighting it?
If I’m leaning a little to my left side, it’s
because I left my right mind at home.
I’ve seen miracles.

There’s always a mental lever
to get them to do
what you want them to do.
Terri is not dead until she’s dead.

The Brits came up with
an expression – wog.
Wily Oriental Gentleman.
There’s a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.
We’re not going to go home.

It’s the amateur who resorts to violence.
Smarts over smack. I’m here to win.
Terri is not dead until she’s dead.

There was a 19-year-old with me
in Baghdad. What’s going on in her head
is what kind of fingernail polish
she’s going to wear.
And she’s sitting across from
a guy from Yemen.
I’ve seen miracles.

Sadism is always right over the hill.
Don’t fool yourself.
There is a part of you that will say, ‘This is fun.’
You have to admit it.

I was burned all the way from my waist up.
You can hardly see it anymore.
By the laws of physics, I should be dead.
So I’ve seen miracles.

I’m here to win.
We’re not going to go home.
Terri is not dead until she’s dead.

Sources: All phrases are from quotes by Bill Tierney, a spook-for-hire who worked most recently as an interrogator for the U.S. Army in Iraq. I have done nothing to alter the substance of his words, other than to juxtapose statements made as a Terri Schiavo supporter with the more extensive quotes from a public forum on interrogation techniques a month earlier. In both cases, reporters described his testimony as highly emotional.

Schiavo Protesters Have Hearts on Sleeves and Anger on Signs, by Rick Lyman, New York Times, March 28, 2005

Spy World, by Patrick Radden Keefe, Boston Globe, February 13

I am indebted to Bill Mon for connecting the dots (see Christian Soldier).

And yes, I “borrowed” the title from an old Ozzy Osbourne song.

May Terri Schiavo rest in peace. May all the prisoners who have died in U.S. custody rest in peace.