Philosophy/Religion – Page 26

December 13, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Santa Lucia

For those of us in the northern hemisphere who live below the Arctic Circle, this time of the long night is also when the sun, low in the sky for much of the day, most easily floods our caves. Now more than ever we are dazzled by the play of shadows. We stretch our half-dead fingers toward the screen.

The barn is no church or synagogue; its plank siding is spaced to allow the circulation of air, not spirit. The floor in the haymow is only half there, and low beams can clobber you in the forehead. You have to watch your step. The sky peers in through a dozen knotholes.

In late afternoon, fat candles of sunlight illuminate the far wall. Golden beams bristle with splinters. Some bear the semi-circular marks of a saw blade, others, the rectilinear patchwork left by an adze. Many were recycled from older barns, reminding us, perhaps, of other necessary sacrifices: the stars, for example, that had to die in order to create the ingredients for life here on the third planet from the present star.

Louvers in lieu of windows offer no view out or in, just a prisoner’s stripes, a choice of identical horizons. High overhead, the cupola is a virtually inaccessible, floorless cell. One can get a tinge of vertigo simply by looking up at it.

The sun singles out the lone lightbulb, offered up for its delectation like the glistening eyeball of the future patron saint of blindness, whose name means light.

Outside, the sun sinks behind the goldenrod, a multitude of blowsy, rounded seedheads as if from some strange flock gone feral. Their only use for the barn is as shelter for the tractor and brush hog that keep the dark woods at bay.

The night goes great and mute.
Now one hears in every silent room
a murmuring, as if from wings.
Behold, at the threshold, standing
all in white, with lights in her hair,
Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!
— Swedish song for St. Lucy’s Day

__________

For more photos of the barn in Plummer’s Hollow, see here.

December 12, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Manikinship

We have willingly suspended our disbelief on strings in order to manipulate it from above.
—Ben Lerner

December 7, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Going to Heaven

In my family, shopping for Christmas and birthdays is virtually synonymous with buying books. I suspect a number of Via Negativa readers are that way, too, so I’d like to put in a pitch for Elizabeth Adams’ new book, Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Books, 2006). Gene Robinson, as most of you will recall, garnered considerable press attention three years ago when he was elected at the Episcopalian convention as the first openly gay bishop in Christendom. What many people may not realize is that Gene is also a very inspiring, charismatic-yet-humble minister and leader. And since his election, he has become to gay Christians what Bishop Desmond Tutu was to blacks under Apartheid, or what the Dalai Lama is to Tibetan Buddhists. (I can hear Gene protesting that he is not worthy of the comparison, but in fact I doubt that either Tutu or the Dalai Lama are the perfect saints that their more ardent followers imagine, either. What they have in common is an ethic of humility, boundless compassion, and leadership-through-service.)

The author is a good friend and my co-editor at qarrtsiluni, and I even read the book in manuscript for her, so I didn’t think a standard book review from me would have a whole lot of credibility. Moreover, Going to Heaven has already been ably reviewed at Velveteen Rabbi, The Middlewesterner, The Tao of Jeremy, Exigency in Specie, mole, and Even the Devils Believe, among others.

As some of those reviews demonstrate, you don’t have to be gay, Episcopalian or even Christian to enjoy this book. When I lent my copy to my mother, she said she found it difficult to put down, and Mom is hardly what you’d call a conventional believer. Of course, she knows some gay and lesbian couples — who doesn’t? — and so was partly interested in reading it in order to see what light it might shed on their situation. But what makes the book compelling, I think, is the storyline and the characters who animate it, just like a good novel. It’s amply illustrated with black-and-white photos, and at just $14.95 (currently $10.17 through Amazon), it’s a heck of a bargain, too.

The central drama, of course, is the ordination and its aftermath. The struggle pits Gene and his supporters against the so-called traditionalists who, in their zealousness to prevent gays (and sometimes also women) from being ordained, are willing to do away with all democratic processes and turn the Episcopalian church into an authoritarian copy of the most regressive member churches of the Anglican communion. In essence, this is the same struggle that we see going on in Sunni Islam, Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, the Catholic church, and many other religious traditions and institutions striving to keep their most fearful followers from turning the church, synagogue or mosque into a fortress against an increasingly scary and materialistic world.

As a good librarian’s son, I generally refrain from marking up my books in any way. But when I re-read Going to Heaven, I found myself reaching for the pencil to mark numerous passages that struck me as quotable. Here are a few of them.

“It’s such a different world we live in today,” [Gene] remarked at a meeting with students at Dartmouth College before his consecration as bishop. […] The students were shocked when he described how many homosexuals used to commit suicide, or become alcoholics or drug addicts after being told repeatedly by society, family and religious leaders that they were unacceptable and disgusting in the eyes of God.

“Homosexuality was so abhorred that those who understood how condemned it was by God just did the logical thing and did themselves in. Suicide was something we thought the good homosexuals did.”

Gene expressed understanding with the plight of bishops like Paul Moore, who were certainly in favor or the ordination of women [in 1974] but were unwilling to go outside the rules of the church. “It’s a fear of throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” Gene said. “You start dealing loosely with the canons, and I don’t know where it ends. When it came time for my own consecration, all these years later, I was approached about the fact that there were at least three bishops who were willing to consecrate me anyway if my election was not consented to at convention. And I would just have none of it. I felt that my election and consecration had to be absolutely by the book — and of course that’s what makes the opposition so angry is that it was absolutely legal, and they have no leg to stand on about that.”

“But in terms of women’s ordination . . . I’ve thought about it a lot. If I had to do it over again knowing what I know now, I don’t know what I would say, I might be tempted to do it. I don’t know how women’s ordination would have come, legally, had they not done what they did.”

On the phone David [Jones] had described himself as an evangelical from a conservative theological background, and he had sounded eager to tell me his story. […] “I didn’t really come to this from the same point of view as many of the progressives. […]

“This whole adventure, the search process and its outcome, has really been an interesting spiritual journey for me. It’s not that I’ve changed my basic theological position at all, but it’s forced me to think about how, if you consistently and accurately apply what you say you believe, you might come out in a place you didn’t expect. And having had the experience of going through what happened over these more than two years, I realize, from my perspective, that the hand of God and the power of the Spirit is so clearly in charge of that, that I can’t say, ‘God, you’re not allowed to do that, it doesn’t fit in with my understanding, stop that!'”

“The thing about the election that I don’t expect anyone outside of New Hampshire to understand is that Gene was not elected because he was gay and because he was going to be the first elected openly gay bishop.” [Former New Hampshire Bishop] Doug [Theuner] rubbed his hands together gleefully, faking a malicious grin, and leaned closer, whispering conspiratorially, “It’s not like the people here were just salivating, waiting to elect the first gay bishop.” Then he waved his hand back over his shoulder in a dismissive gesture. “First of all, New Hampshire people aren’t that way, for the most part. They’re — unpretentious. They have their quirks and idiosyncrasies that they love — the ‘Live Free or Die’ thing, no income taxes — but they’re not out there trying to win the world to their point of view. That’s part of the ‘Live Free or Die’ thing: I’ll do my thing, you do yours. There might have been a few people who were all excited” — he rubbed his hands together again — “about the idea that we might elect the first gay bishop, but most people never even thought about that.” The former bishop sat back and straightened up, and his voice boomed out, large enough to fill any cathedral. “They elected someone they knew and trusted! And knew was competent! And, oh yeah, he happened to be gay.”

In almost every audience, someone rose to ask Gene about how he interpreted Biblical passages that seemed to clearly denounce homosexual behavior. Gene […] usually began by saying that, as Christians, we take Scripture very seriously — and then adding that Episcopalians have always taken Scripture seriously, and never literally. “Some of the critics are calling themselves traditionalists,” he said, “and yet are trying to take us to a place that has never been our tradition. Ever. We’ve never been a denomination that that literally read and believed every word of the Bible. On the other hand, we take it all seriously. But what I’m going to tell you is that I don’t think the Bible addresses what we are addressing today, which are faithful, life-long, monogamous relationships between people of the same gender. The Bible doesn’t talk about that.” [See Father Jake Stops the World for an extended quotation from this passage.]

Gene says he likes to think of the Episcopal Church as “advanced placement religion” and explains, “It’s hard work if you start by saying, ‘We have to use our minds and prayerfully engage one another as a community of people, using the best scholarship we have among us, to figure out what those writings [in the Bible] meant to the person who wrote them, and then ask the question, “Are they eternally binding?” But that’s what we, as Episcopalians, try to do.'”

Gene Robinson has said bluntly that organized religion in the Western world is at a crossroads. “Unless the church recovers its sense of what Jesus meant when he spoke of ‘restoring sight to the blind and setting the captives free,’ it runs the risk of either actually dying, or becoming hopelessly irrelevant.”
[…]
“It’s the thing you’ve heard me say ten thousand times, which is that God loves us beyond our wildest imagining. That’s why I use a passage from Isaiah so often, about ‘proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor.’ There are so many people, including people in the church, who have no idea how favored they are by God.

“But for oppressed people, that message is harder to believe. I think for people of color, for women, for gay and lesbian folk, they’ve been told that they’re ‘less than’ for so long that it comes as especially good news to them, but it’s also harder for them to believe. They have been shamed, and if they had faith, it has been battered and eroded and picked at, which is why Jesus was always preaching to those types of people, bending over backwards to let them know.

“We’ve had some gay people who have done very well — Martina Navratilova, arguably the best tennis player ever, Ellen DeGeneres, Greg Louganis — people who have accomplished a lot. But maybe why there has been so much furor over me and what I’ve accomplished, or whatever God has accomplished within me, is because it goes beyond saying, ‘I think I’m all right.’ It says, ‘I think God thinks I’m all right.’ […]

“It goes back to what I said in my investiture sermon: nobody will get on your case if you preach a judgmental, narrow, punishing God, but if you start preaching a God that is too loving, too merciful, and too forgiving, people will be all over you like a duck on a junebug. It makes people crazy. I think that is fascinating, that so many people would not see the idea of a loving, forgiving God as ‘good news.’ That’s exactly what happened to Jesus. The people who didn’t see God that way were the ones who crucified him.”

December 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Exorcism

Our task, is it not an exorcism,
a response to the inscrutable challenge?
–Enrique Lihn

The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself.
–Randall Jarrell

__________

For the rest of my deer skull series (shot yesterday), see here. Mosaic created with fd’s Flickr Toys from my own photos: 1. black bear footprint, 2. mannequins, 3. Baltimore checkerspot, 4. orange and blue, 5. phoebe, 6. art for sale, 7. solitary vireo 2, 8. fawn face, 9. The Middlewesterner, 10. wheel bug with wasp, 11. mushroom beast, 12. cairn man, 13. locust borer, 14. turkey hen, 15. Carolina wren, 16. annual cicada on sidewalk crack, 17. spectacled owl on eggs, 18. wattled curassow, 19. Sri Lankan mask, 20. squirrel window, 21. field sparrow grooming 3, 22. snail 3, 23. wood turtle with its head drawn in, 24. convertible, 25. vulture 2

November 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wilderness

Here’s a new definition I just thought up this morning:

Wilderness is any place where human beings can know themselves to be endangered.*

__________

*The Wilderness Act of 1964, written by Pennsylvania native Howard Zahniser, defines wilderness as

an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

“Untrammeled” is a great word — and, as advocates for more eastern Wilderness like to point out, it is not a synonym for “pristine.” Few parts of the North American continent have been unaffected by their 10+ millennia of human occupation. But I think it’s also critical to note, pace timber industry apologists, that the chief “management” tool of the Native Americans was fire: an essentially untamable force whose careful manipulation requires the very opposite of managerial hubris. I’m not sure whether periodic burning qualifies as trammeling — “enmesh[ing] in or as if in a fishing net; hinder[ing] the activity or free movement of,” as the Free Online Dictionary puts it — but I’m quite sure that fire suppression amounts to the worst kind of trammeling.

Wilderness has roots in our Biblical heritage, as I’ve mentioned here before. In the Gospels, Jesus is tested in the wilderness for forty days, following the time-worn practice of prophets and leaders in the Tanakh, where

Desert or wilderness (tohu) is portrayed as part of a separate order that in some sense (as the tohu-wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2) predates and gives rise to Creation; thus, it is a place of testing and renewal (for Jacob/Israel, David, Elijah, etc.) and an image almost of Emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

American Indians, too, valued wild areas for their power to heal and transform, usually through some harrowing encounter with ultimate otherness.

So from a humanistic as well as an ecological perspective, wilderness is much more than a mere park — in fact, in many ways it is the opposite of a park. Though Yellowstone National Park was the world’s first (1872) federally protected area devoted to nature conservation, its original conception was flawed in three significant ways. First, it was founded upon the white supremacist doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Not only were the Indians then resident in the park not consulted about its creation, but they were driven out as so much vermin. Second, the expulsion of humans was followed by the eradication of natural predators, in accordance with the Western European demonization of carnivores. Third, we now know that, big as it is, Yellowstone National Park is still too small to fully preserve the genetic diversity of the species it is intended to protect. Conservation biologists now recognize that effective conservation areas cannot simply be set apart from the rest of the world, like modern versions of Noah’s Ark. Boundary fences, too — despite what I wrote about “gated communities” the other day — are an impermissible form of trammeling.

Wilderness must be web-like, with protected nodes and linkages to allow the free interchange of genetic materials — hence, for example, the international effort known as the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. For this to work, we have to stop thinking in dichotomous terms — humans versus nature, urban (or reservation) squalor versus pristine park. The human and non-human realms must be much more effectively interwoven, while preserving the sovereignty of each. In human-dominated areas, people must learn to become better hosts for nature and for “the widow, the orphan, and the resident alien,” as the Bible always puts it. In wilderness, the tables are turned and it is we who are poor and homeless.

Incidentally, if you want to keep abreast of news affecting wilderness and wildlife in the United States, be sure to bookmark Alan Gregory’s Conservation News.

November 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wild geese

My daughter — the one I never had — I’ve given her up for dead. Words in a dream. Whose? Pale gray skin rising out of sleep, this sky. One size fits all. Wild geese so low over the trees, you can hear their wingbeats.

Last night, my long-dead grandmother, impossibly wrinkled. We were standing in different lines; I don’t think she saw me. –Do you have anything to declare? –No, nothing. It’s true, she rarely did.

This morning, the smell of skunk goes well with coffee. The trees are bare now except for the beeches & some of the oaks, the big ones. Standing under them, I can’t snap a photo without freezing a leaf in mid-fall.

How can we live without the unknown before us? Certainty is a nightmare. At least when I dream, I know I’m dreaming! But the bench looks better empty, I decide, & wander off.

November 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Beneath the surface

Yesterday, I kept looking at leaves in shallow water (slideshow). I was entranced by the play of sunlight on patterns in the surface. Floating leaves reminded me of sealed-up windows; sunken leaves were like sealed-up doors.

It was a quick trip to town that had gotten me thinking that way.

In standard Western dualistic thinking, it’s commonplace to scorn the surface in favor of what lies beneath. Deep is good; shallow is bad. “Beauty is only skin deep,” we say, which of course is utter nonsense. But supposing that superficial prettiness were the whole of beauty — wouldn’t that constitute a pretty strong argument for superficiality?

“Only a facade,” we say, as if there’s such a thing as a true face underneath all the masks. And as if one doesn’t have a perfect right to choose which face one wants to show the world, and to keep the rest private.

If seeing were the whole of knowing, we would have nothing but surfaces to go on. Fortunately, though, there’s also hearing. When something emits a sound, relative pitch and quality of tone suggest things about its internal structure that the unaided eye could discover only through dissection. Hearing respects the wholeness and integrity of the other in a way that looking never can.

It’s in our nature to see faces everywhere, and to impute personality even to the most impersonal forces of nature. The encounter with the face of another may be, as Levinas suggests, the very origin of ethical behavior. But there is also something that resists our looking, along with any and all attempts to domesticate it. We know it by the music that appears when, to our limited way of thinking, a mere cacophony should prevail. Go crouch beside the stream sometime and you’ll see what I mean.

October 24, 2006November 22, 2015 by Dave Bonta

End games

the_end

In every collection of poems, essays, or tales, there’s one poem, essay, or tale that I don’t finish. An avid reader, like an ardent lover, must never fall prey to the delusion that s/he has completely comprehended the object of her/his attentions. Some mystery must remain. A map with no blank spots never tempted an explorer.

***

Suppose you wanted to hire an end-of-life coach. What qualifications would you look for?

Perhaps the question sounds absurd. But show me an authentic teacher who is not, in effect, an end-of-life coach.

***

Despite being more or less a secular humanist, I often describe myself as religious, too. The semantic janitor in me insists that the fashion for calling oneself “spiritual but not religious” simply muddies the cistern of public discourse. Moreover, using the word spiritual might imply belief in the literal existence of spirits, whereas religious implies nothing more than religiosity, which can include behavior as basic as showing respect for the dead.

True, the universalizing religions — Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and so forth — advocate profounder shifts in the inner lives of their adherents. But most religions that have ever existed have been altogether less ambitious and more circumspect about such questions as the possible end and meaning of life. The universalizing religions propose to teach humility; village and tribal religions actually model it, to some extent. And it’s this kind of existential humility, rather than the adherence to any particular belief, that seems most characteristic of true religiosity.

***

“My parents were so uptight,” she said, “they wouldn’t even utter the word ‘breast.’ And of course they sent us to Catholic schools, too.

“My brothers and I had no idea what to call those unmentionable things on a woman’s chest, so we made up our own word: puff-outs. We used to go through magazines together, laughing at all the pictures of women with their comical puff-outs!”

***

“Human females are unique in the concentration of fat deposits in breasts and buttocks. Although breasts develop in some primates in first pregnancy, human females are further distinguished by breast development during puberty, usually several years before pregnancy.

“Humans have been interested in breasts and buttocks, in one way or another, for a long time, as illustrated by the so-called Venus figurines of Upper Paleolithic Europe. More recently attempts have been made to explain the evolution of the unusual anatomical features. Here I present an integrated hypothesis, proposing that breasts and buttocks evolved to signal a female’s nutritional state to males, in the context of facilitating female choice of mate. High male parental investment is critical to this point of view. I reach the conclusion that humans stand out against a general background of sexual selection wherein many animals exhibit male ornaments to attract females.”

–John G. H. Cant, “Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Breasts and Buttocks,” American Naturalist, Vol. 117, No. 2 (Feb., 1981)

***

The buttocks are at once the humblest and the proudest feature of our anatomies. In Buddhist meditation, the buttocks may appear to adopt a subservient position, only to return to prominence during prostrations. “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” as George Clinton once said.

***

Christian fundamentalists remind me of straight guys who are into anal intercourse. Both seem to be missing the point, somehow. They are idolaters, for whom the well-formed text or body with all its comic superfluities is merely the means to an end. And of course the end can’t come quickly enough, as far as they are concerned. It was to help these kinds of people that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass.

October 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Rut

After six days of being sick and sleeping in odd patterns (if at all), what a joy to wake up well before light and sit out on the porch with my coffee again! It’s good to get back into the old rut. Sirius glows balefully above the trees to the south. A great-horned owl calls once from the same direction. Water gurgles in the ditches on both sides of the yard with a pleasing stereophonic effect — something I might not notice if it were daylight.

The deer are restless this morning. All the while I sip my coffee — some twenty minutes — I hear them crashing back and forth through the woods on the other side of the driveway. It’s not a bear or a coyote that’s spooked them, I don’t think; I don’t hear any alarm snorts or stamping of front hooves, and the mad dashes seem too frequent and too short. What I hear instead are the strange, low grunts of a buck in rut. At one point, there’s a higher-pitched vocalization, almost a moan. I wonder if I might be hearing some advanced stage of the mating game. More likely, though, it’s the sound of rival bucks contending for the privilege of servicing a doe in estrus.

Imagine what it would be like if human beings went into rut and estrus like white-tailed deer: if males were obsessed with sex for only two months out of the year instead of all twelve, and females for just one day! The economy would collapse. Without the dependable lure of sex and all the anxieties attending the quest for personal sex appeal, how would you get consumers to spend money? And with nothing to sublimate, who would bother to farm, make widgets, or write blog posts?

It’s funny, every year brings fresh evidence that most of the vaunted properties of the human heart and mind that were once thought to set us apart actually differ only in degree, not in kind, from the mental abilities of other animals. Tool-using? Complex problem-solving? Language? Altruistic behavior? Reverence for the remains of dead relatives? Warfare? Peace-making? All these and more can be found in other species. Symbolic language still appears uniquely human, and I suppose you can consider that a difference in kind if you want to. But what most separates us from other animals lies not in our minds but in our bodies — specifically, in women’s bodies. They don’t go into estrus. Along with our close relatives the bonobos, humans are virtually the only species that’s physically capable of making whoopie any time of the year.

Which is not to say that many other species don’t enjoy genital stimulation — including (gasp!) with members of the same sex — throughout the year; they simply aren’t fertile then and can’t engage in coitus. On the positive side, the virtually unique sexiness of the human female seems closely linked with the complexity of our social systems and the concomitant expansion in brainpower (I hesitate to say “consciousness,” since that’s such a nebulous and loaded term). Many researchers now suggest that extended human longevity, especially for post-menopausal females, derives from the competitive advantages enjoyed by those with the best daycare arrangements (‘Hey, Grandma…’). On the downside, liberated from the solar cycle, human females became shackled to the rhythms of our lifeless companion planet instead. Free to have sex whenever they want, they became vulnerable to sexual predators year ’round. [UPDATE: see comments section for discussion of rape among other animals.] And once we became smart enough to figure out how to eliminate or fend off our natural predators, human populations were free to grow exponentially.

In a nutshell, then: to be human means, above all else, to be uniquely capable of love. Or from another perspective, which strikes me as equally valid, to be human means to be uniquely fucked.

After I go back inside, I grab my copy of Appalachian Autumn and look up “Deer: white-tailed: mating behavior of” in the index. (Fortunately, my mother took the time to compile good indices for all four of her Appalachian Seasons books.) I refresh my memory with this passage, from November 24:

At the Far Field thicket I found more evidence of the rutting season — several secondary scrapes littered with deer tracks and feces. Again I conjured up a vision, this one of bucks and does meeting here and pairing off, an anthropomorphic idea totally at odds with what really happens between bucks and does. Although does can be choosy, they usually mate repeatedly with only one buck. Two days before a doe is actually ready, she begins seeking out a buck by leaving a trail of urine and pheromones. While every buck in the area may track her down, usually only the dominant buck, which drives off the others, claims her by “tending” her until she comes into estrus. Then he may copulate with her anywhere from once or twice during her twenty-four hours of receptivity to many times (one researcher reported eight times during the daylight alone). Since most breeding is done at night, actual figures are hard to come by. Once her time is up, though, the buck heads off to find another receptive doe. During the sixty-day rutting season, a mature buck may breed with between four and twenty does. On the other hand, after her twenty-four-hour fling, assuming she has conceived, the doe has no more interest in bucks.

It may sound as if the bucks are having all the fun. Perhaps they are, but like humans on alcoholic binges, they pay a heavy toll at the end. The prolonged stresses of the rut leave them depleted of energy stores right at the onset of winter. Many of them will linger through till February or March only to die miserable deaths from starvation and/or hypothermia. With luck, they’ll fall to the sharp fangs of a predator or a well-aimed bullet instead, but one way or another, their bodies will return to the food chain. The herd simply doesn’t need all those bucks. Contrary to the fond beliefs of many more romantic folks, nature is not a loving mother.

I suppose some people will read this and wonder why I have such a bleak worldview. I can hear it now: “Dave, you just need to get laid!” (Well, maybe I do, but that’s irrelevant. My beliefs are carefully thought out and entirely rational!) The thing is, the world doesn’t feel bleak to me. If you believe, as I do, that the only paradise that matters must be sought in the present moment, than what does it matter if in the long run we are all somebody else’s dinner? Right here, right now, the coffee is good, the stars are beautiful, and the night is alive with primal music — the flow of water, and the urgent and wondrous and terrifying dance that attends the creation of new life. Regardless of how attentive or distracted I may be, the ability to draw breath at such a moment feels like pure grace. I wouldn’t want things any other way.

***

Speaking of grace, this week for some reason Via Negativa has been getting an unusual number of interesting comments, which have been a welcome source of diversion to me. Maybe it’s just because the sorts of things I’ve felt up to writing about (sickness, politicians and toilet seats) are a bit more inviting than my usual fare. Actually, I rarely mind the relative paucity of comments here; nine times out of ten, I don’t comment on the blogs I read, either. I tend to do my blog reading late in the day, when my creative energies are at a low ebb, and besides, I figure I’m doing my part to support other blogs and bloggers through my Smorgasblog project, the Festival of the Trees, and qarrtsiluni. But if one doesn’t leave comments, one can’t expect to get very many in return, which is why I feel especially blessed that Via Negativa still gets so many of such high quality.

The message string for my post on toilet seats was an eye-opener for me. I had no idea that toilet seats could evoke such passions. Don’t miss your chance to weigh in, if you haven’t already, on this weighty and multi-faceted subject.

Even more recently, what do you use to keep your place in a book? If you thought the answer was “a bookmark,” you may be mistaken. Don’t miss the great contributions of Joan and butuki, among others, to the riddle thread, where the elusive sylph also makes a brief reappearance, gesturing enigmatically with a cat’s whisker.

October 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

New seat

The seat on the new toilet cracked after less than a year. No more cheap shit, we resolved.

Just for the record, it wasn’t me that split it. I’m not going to name the culprit, but he has broken his share of chairs, as well — not because he’s too heavy (he isn’t), but because he can’t sit still.

There are some things it just doesn’t make sense to be impatient about, you know? Like meditation — the whole point is to practice stillness and letting go, right? Only one side of the O-shaped seat split, though, so it still held together well enough for my daily practice, such as it is. The bit of a jagged edge helped prevent me from getting too comfortable, kept me focused.

But this is a guesthouse, and the owners — my parents — became concerned that some of their guests might not take it as lightly as I do. So this afternoon, Dad finally splurged and bought a new seat. It’s a 16.5″ (42 cm) Westport^TM Designer, “Hard,” with Lift-Off^TM for Easy Cleaning and Quiet Slow-Close^TM Action.

The old seat came off without too much trouble. I like jobs that require nothing but a screwdriver, because that’s the only tool I have in the house. If I need a hammer, I have to go borrow one from my parents. Though sometimes I can get by with a rock.

It felt a little odd to be putting a toilet seat in a garbage can.

One thing I wondered as I put the new seat on is why public restrooms always have U-shaped toilet seats, while toilet seats for use in the home are O-shaped? Perhaps the latter is more of an invitation to solitary contemplation, suggesting by its very shape both completeness and emptiness. I mean, I can think of some practical reasons for not having the seat connect in front for toilets with a high rate of usage, but I’m curious about why no one ever installs that kind of seat at home. I suppose the U-shape is too closely associated with public restrooms, and people are after a different ambience at home. After all, for the average American household, the bathroom is the most often redecorated room in the house. It’s not just a place to shit, shower and shave, it’s a place to nest. Maybe lay an egg or two.

The new seat appeared most commodious, and I could hardly wait to take it for a test-sit. But if you don’t have to go, you can’t go, you know? (And just think how much simpler our lives would be if things were always that way — if we were incapable of doing anything unnecessary! Heck, if my mind worked half as well as my digestive system, I’d be in deep nirvana by now.)

So I contented myself with trying out the Quiet Slow-Close^TM Action a few times, and I have to admit, I was pretty impressed. Push the seat or the lid down as hard as you want; they still won’t slam. Instead, they sink slowly and ever so quietly into position, as if to remind us that we have all the time in the world. Just sit.