The Medusa of legend
actually started out as
a bodhisattva-in-training.
Like Avalokiteśvara
with eleven faces,
she aspired to sprout
a forest of little headlets
atop her head, so as never
to fail to meet a believer’s
imploring gaze.
But she felt compassion
for the stone-workers,
& worried how men
would render her
in relief carvings on cave walls
or chisel her in the round
from soft marble.
She was stirred by the hiss
of insense sticks, the censer
a-bristle: it sounded
like bliss, that extinction.
If the goal was to end
the cycle of rebirth,
she reasoned, why not
reincarnate as something
utterly immune to desire?
Let the others say
they’d forestall nirvana
until every blade of grass
attained liberation.
Medusa vowed not
to leave a stone
unturned.
Squirrel mind
Consider ecstasy: standing beside oneself. There are things that seem to pull us out of ourselves and our ruminations — or, perhaps I should say “our” ruminations — for there is an autonomous and almost impersonal life to the currents of thought that stream through our consciousness. The weather — the darkening skies, the leaves blown sideways, the ping of rain on glass — attracts and holds our attention and displaces (for a time) whatever tape-loop of anxiety currently seems to be at the top of one’s playlist.
It’s the same thing with taking pictures of weeds, I realized yesterday: looking about with squirrel mind, waiting for the frisson of attraction (red leaf, acorn, berry) to animate the arm that holds the camera and the eye that peers through the lens. I am storing up caches of images against an instinctually anticipated great hunger and long winter night.
From television to shrine
I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. This one describes the construction of a shrine that still has pride of place in my living room. The somewhat tangential disquisition on Yoruba religion could probably stand to be cut, but what the hell. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)
Can the merely cynical be invested with a higher value? And if so, would this stepping outside of a stepping-outside require some leap of faith?
[…]
There sits the shrine in my living room, divested of masks and the four cynical words, which quickly warped. The weird thing is, four years ago when I wanted to stop smoking, this shrine to negativity really did seem to help. Through the worst of the craving I kept a half-dozen cigarettes there in the offering bowl, among the plastic fruit. Somehow just seeing them there, day after day, strengthened my resolve.
Rabelais, Bakhtin and the Zuni
I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. One of the biggest differences between my blogging then and my blogging now is in the proportion of prose to poetry, which was almost 180 degrees from what it is now. And I was so much more, um, opinionated back then! But I like to re-read posts like this one from time to time to remind myself of what I believe — or would believe, if I believed more strongly in the importance of belief. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)
Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques?
Living at peace
Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for the day of our deaths. Today we wear white, like our burial shrouds. (Some wear a white robe called a kittel, in which they will someday be buried.) Today we abstain from food and drink; the dead need neither. And today we say the vidui, the confessional prayers, as we will say on our deathbeds. As Rabbi Shef Gold has written, “For the whole day of Yom Kippur, we act as if it is our last day, our only day to face the Truth, forgive ourselves and each other, remember who we are and why we were born.”
Today is our chance to release all the karmic baggage we haven’t managed to let go in the last year. To set ourselves, and everyone we know, free. Not so that we can die at peace — but so that we can live at peace, with ourselves and with one another.
Speaking for the 47 percent
I see who you are, Mr. Romney: you’re the kid in the locker room who assaults a boy for being gay. You grew into the guy who thinks it’s okay to tie your family dog to the top of your car for a road trip. You’re a man who lacks a basic empathy chip in your hard wiring, the essential character to experience other beings as more than percentage points or likely voters in swing states. You have the suit. You have the haircut. You have more money than God. But you don’t have the soul to actually imagine others outside of your small and privileged experience. And this, I’m afraid, is your personal tragedy. Please, don’t make it ours.
Reading Dawkins
You can make a bold claim — God is a delusion — if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe”.
Memo on roleplaying games
Note: When you write your article about online roleplaying games, do not say: We are not possessed by demons, we are possessed by our own life force, our incredible power is bent back on us in a world unequipped to accept the magnificence of our offerings. Poetry no longer decodes our desires and if any does, we don’t know where to find it, so we pour all of our nobility and our repressed physical courage and our keen intelligence and our telepathic connection to nature into little pixelated beings that resemble us, that remind us of why we once came to this planet to be alive. Because you’re pretty sure someone probably already said that.
Ramadan in Istanbul
It’s at night that Ramazan becomes palpable to the nonobservant, and that’s one of the reasons I love it. The whole city becomes as nocturnal as I, by disposition and habit, already am. The streets are lively well past midnight: people stay out late, strolling on the shore, filling sidewalk teahouses in the warm night air. Children are up late too—they don’t fast, but in summer there’s no need to wake for school in the morning, so they’re out and about, walking with their families and playing on the sidewalks. There’s something of a fairground atmosphere: cotton candy and ice-cream and street vendors selling cheap plastic toys. But the gaiety goes hand-in-hand with marks of piety, like the low, continous sounds issuing from the mosques—Qur’an recitation, prayers, ilahi—and the lightbulbs strung between their minarets.
Hell From Below
The upstairs neighbors keep to themselves.
Who wouldn’t? It’s a rough neighborhood.
Gang members are so brazen
they’ve taken to wearing police uniforms.
I sublet a basement from the rats
& commute to work on an exercise wheel.
The shower smells a bit like sulphur,
but the hot water always comes on right away.
I pass people on the street
with faces like crushed cigarette butts,
but I’m sure they’re perfectly nice
once you get to know them.
I hear things, sure—
some kind of BDSM party, I guess,
or an amusement park
with too many scary rides.
The fire alarm goes off on the hour
& there’s a low thrumming, as if from a mill.
Whatever they’re doing up there,
it’s got rhythm.
From time to time the shrieking stops
& the silence wakes me from
a sound sleep, wondering
what fresh hell is this.