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August 2, 2007
SWINGING IN A LOCKET OF MIND
I wrote the following poem in a less filled-out form in the early 1980s, at a point when I was having a very difficult time. As I reworked the poem recently, I could see myself back then, stuck and deeply despairing, not quite far enough out on the edge to take the necessary leap. There was movement, but it was mostly just a swinging in a locket of mind, the kind of ricocheting between contrasting inner stands that beats us down into the stand of not taking a stand.
Picture a dull grey Pacific Northwest Winter’s morning, bleakly icy, seen with troubled eyes through a dusty basement window in an unlit room. A quarter of a century ago it was, but the feeling of it is so precise and clear to me now, as I feel wave after wave of caring for that long-ago me as he sits there so intensely unmoving, assuming a wooden reach, his lean questionmark silhouette as boxed in as it is saturated with longing...
Oak trunk’s scaly iron
ivy-smothered mutely dense
Bare branches sprawling out
atop the blackish green chaos
Muddy stick-figures waving
in dawn’s smudged yellow light
summerhungry children’s arms
skinny and acutely angled
Their inarticulate and directionless tumble
framing not only the wind
but also the secret ache of his glance
Tattered birdsong thin and shrill
embroidering the winter chill
The face of a long-ago self
floats past in the window
a half-fractured eggshell with no mouth
The night’s dreams drift nearby
a pile of warped and shimmering rectangles
spilling too much to remember
Vapors of meaning
fleeing through the glass
eluding his grasp
riddled and cut into disappearing pieces
by frozen daylight
And still
A larger dream
Holds him tightly
Enraptured
Dumbly captured
Swinging in a locket of mind
Ivy-bound and mute
Assuming a wooden reach
Such a busy still life
Such a narrowly framed hustle
Such a stranglehold of mental muscle
His face a window
addicted to its shutters
His oaken torso
dreaming of luminous axes
biting to heartwood
bloodsap tracing new horizons
surrounded by windowless sky
and a suddenly green backyard
that at last makes him cry out
the long-denied goodbye
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August 4, 2007
Poetry doesn’t explain, but reveals.
Poetry took hold of me when I was young, moving me wide and deep with its magical blending of meaning and rhythm. I didn’t even know it was poetry, didn’t name it thus, didn’t get self-conscious about it. It was but evocative wordplay, the verbal face of my love of art and bare creativity. By the time I reached Grade 3, I was busily drawing for my classmates — portraits, Disney characters, whatever my pencils brought to paper — and a year later also began reading poetry to them, never doubting that they weren’t interested. My life was far from easy — both while awake and while dreaming — and poetry helped keep me afloat, connecting me to both surface and depth without sentencing me to either.
But by the time I was 11, just starting high school (Grades 7 through 12 were crammed together under one roof), poetry left my life, or, more accurately, I turned away from poetry. I grew drier, harder, losing contact with depth. Poems died without any fizz or fuss during their stultifying dissection in English classes. Teacher after teacher insisted that we eviscerate poem after poem, and then poke through the innards to extract things like theme. Thus did poetry wither in sleeping classrooms, sucked dry by probes and tweezers and an exaggeratedly rational penetration. Poetry trembled before its bloodless murder and I didn’t care, and didn’t dare care. I’d gone flat, run over by my ambition to be what I was not.
The only magic for me during high school arose in rare athletic moments, as when I’d get happily absorbed in the coiled flow and explosive release of a discus, or find an unexpected grace during the agonizing last quarter of a mile race. My attention went from poetry and art to the hard sciences, at which I excelled academically but found no joy in, except for the fleeting pleasure of seeing a high mark atop an aced exam. But poetry had not really died. It hung around on the outskirts, gnawing at my scientific direction and certainties. Still, I kept my back to it. I had more important things to do.
When I was 21, I began a Ph.D. program in Biochemistry. My academic skills had won me a generous three-year scholarship that would cover all my expenses; I was closing in on the professorship that my parents seemed to view as my destiny, and that I viewed with remarkable disinterest. Poetry was knocking on the door, but I was in no position to be listening. So I began my program, doing my courses in enzyme kinetics and ultracentrifuge dynamics, and getting acquainted with my dissertation topic (which I’ll get to a bit later). And at the same time I started to come uncaged and really alive, expanding socially and diving into countercultural ethics. It was 1969. I stopped shaving and let my hair grow long. I sported gold-framed granny glasses, bell-bottom pants, square-toed cowboy boots, and tapered shirts, while the cleancut “A” student I’d been for so, so long huddled in a corner of my mind, unable to command my attention, except during my increasingly sporadic visits to the biochemistry laboratory. I was still able to score high marks on my tests, but I was neglecting my doctoral thesis. Poetry was closing in. I, of course, didn’t have a clue.
My research task for my dissertation was to isolate and study a phosphorylase enzyme found in the heart muscles of rabbits. Bags of frozen rabbit hearts were sent to me from a rabbit slaughterhouse. I’d grind up 300 rabbit hearts at a time, eventually crystallizing out the desired enzyme. In my working out of the details of this procedure, I practised isolating a similar enzyme from the thigh muscles of rabbits kept in the biochemistry department. I refused to kill the rabbits; someone else would, breaking their necks, and then I would have to skin the still-warm bodies to remove the thigh muscles. The room where I did my task was full of caged rabbits, perhaps 200 in total. Without a sound, they watched me work, their pink-eyed aliveness subtly quivering in the sterile white room. (Three years later when I was in Bali — many adventures later — walking alone along a lengthy stretch of pale sand, I suddenly remembered the rabbits, the skinnings and all those hearts, and felt what I wouldn’t let myself feel then, weeping hard for all of it, including my desertion of myself long before.)
Sitting one day in a library cubicle doing some biochemical research, I pushed aside my stack of tomes and spontaneously began scribbling poetry, writing as fast as I could. I had to get it out, as if caught up in a writing equivalent of the worst-case scenario of a sufferer from irritable bowel syndrome. The word poured forth, crookedly spilling across the page, messy and wild, bursting with intensity and color. Never before had I written poetry, except when forced to in high school English classes. Much of what I wrote that day was lurid and in need of a bib, but one line still stands out: “Chaos was seeking annulment of its marriage to Order, claiming mental cruelty.”
Chaos was calling to me, and poetry was its emissary. For all but my closest friends, I had pretended to be following the course dictated by my Ph.D. program. But that tidy world was on the verge of disintegration, and I was doing less and less to keep it together. It was webbed with ever-widening rifts from within, and my poetry was a diamond wedge driving into those cracks. Half a year or so later, I left my doctoral program. There was no turning back. Poetry had me, and I happily surrendered. Not that I had in any sense mastered the writing of poetry, but I was in love with the process of creating it, and being carried by that process into unknown territory, so that my very life began to feel like poetry on the loose.
The sanctums of graduate school were quickly replaced by a very different sort of schooling, one which I craved, and the more unscrubbed and out on the edge the better. I moved to Vancouver and immediately took a room in a funky old house with at least 8 bedrooms, finding myself living with dropouts from conventional culture (my time in that house will get its due in a later blog) — drug addicts, army deserters, and assorted outcasts, with little money and nothing resembling regular hours. My room, on the fourth floor, soon became known as the abode of a mad poet, a label that I quickly grew very fond of, if only because it conferred on me a credential that stood in stark contrast to all the time I had done in scientific academia. Now poetry had made an identity claim on me, with which I was fine. I didn’t make any money writing my poetry, but there was enough value in it to keep me churning it out, to the delight of m housemates.
Poetry stayed with me after I left that house, gaining a touch of discipline while accompanying me through crazy adventure after adventure, including two years of worldwide travel on the cheap. And when I wanted to stay with travel too long, poetry stepped in, making it short and sweet: “Traveling was I through land after land, but still a tourist in my own heart.” I had looked down upon tourists during my travels, seeing them skim over the surface of places into which I had gone deep, but I had not yet begun the adventure of knowing myself from the deep inside. Poetry wouldn’t let me off the hook.
It still won’t.
Poetry is what happens when we are outwritten by what we are writing. Poetry wings the ordinary and roots the extraordinary.
My life sings and bleeds in colors bare and bright
Riding waves of shattered moon through the night
Nothing is moving yet everything’s in motion
Only broken waves will ever know the ocean
Gone, gone am I
Birthing me am I
Last sigh of a vagabond wave am I
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August 11, 2007
THE INVASION OF BREAST IMPLANTS
Breast augmentation is the sterilized term for it, but whatever we call it, it’s showing no signs of diminishing. There were just under 330,000 such operations in the United States in 2006, up 13% from 2005.
It’s a booming business (and a relatively new one: There were no breast implants done before 1962), fed in large part by the increasing acceptance that it’s getting. If it makes you feel better, then just do it — such seems to be the prevailing, look-how-tolerant-I-am attitude toward breast implants these days, with little real attention being devoted to the underlying motivation, both personal and cultural, for wanting to have them in the first place.
Yes, there’s been some consideration of the insecurity, not-enoughness, and men-prefer-larger-ones social pressures that motivate most women who get implants, but this is more than offset by the increasingly popular notion that having larger or more uppity breasts constitutes, to whatever degree, a solution to such insecurity and related factors. After all, don’t women feel better about themselves when they’ve got the breasts they want, or at least the breasts that most men apparently want them to have? There may be some truth in this, but it is a very superficial and partial truth; the underlying insecurity and not-enoughness remain implanted, regardless of the new breasts’ magnetism, compensatory cleavage and thrust, and power to reel in male gazes and fantasies. Boob jobs are mostly just time-delayed booby prizes.
Before I go further, I need to say that in some cases — post-masectomy and post-huge-weight-loss being two obvious examples — breast implants/reconstruction is a good thing. But for the great majority of women, such surgery is not necessarily such a good thing. A recent study, for example, shows that the suicide rate is three times as high for women with breast implants as it is for women without them. This, of course, does not mean that having breast implants causes a higher rate of suicide, but that there’s a positive correlation between having implants and suicide. What’s key here is what the women who have had breast implants were doing before getting them, especially with regard to their less-than-happy feelings.
If men — not all men, but plenty of men — didn’t want women to have larger breasts, would women? In most cases, no. But the male preference, at least in contemporary Western culture, for bigger breasts shows no sign of abating, and nor does our media’s obsession with them — which all adds up to an enormous pressure being applied to women with regard to their breast-size. There is a natural attraction to breasts — for women as well as men — but we’ve gone far beyond that, into the airbrushed recesses of unnatural attraction, attraction that’s little more than socially acceptable obsession. The fact that the compulsive pull to bigger breasts infects many men (and is considered normal in many circles) is accompanied by the fact that it is not ordinarily examined in any real depth.
Boobs, tits, titties, knockers, jugs, bazongas, cupcakes, puppies, melons, fun bags, floaters, fog lights, hand warmers, hooters, warheads, bazookas, cans, rack — and the list goes on, stretching far beyond the corseted decorum of “bosom” and “ample” and similar terms. That there are so many synonyms for “breast” simply reflects how much our culture has been pervaded by the idea, sight, and promise of human mammary glands. Here, size does matter — how else to explain the inordinate attention that Pamela Anderson has received for her breasts, despite the fact that they are universally known to be implants? The sighting of size, whatever its origin, is automatically arousing for many men; they may not particularly enjoy the feel of fake breasts, but the sight more than makes up for it.
The rubbernecking lust and I’d-love-to-fuck-her fantasies that are aroused by the sight of a pair of blown-up breasts is arguably natural at a certain stage of development — adolescence (which often extends into old age) — but not natural once a man has outgrown such a stage. He may still look, but in the same way that he’d look at a lavishly-blossomed tree or passing car or a prominent pair of eyelashes or ears — whatever stands out in his visual field at the time. Curious, focused, but not erotic.
His sexualized gaze is reserved for his beloved or lover; he does not have to repress his urge to look with erotic interest at other women, for he’s outgrown such desire (which does not mean that his sexual passion is diminished!). It simply no longer pulls at him. He does not avoid looking at other women’s breasts (including those that are implants) — unlike men who are trying to be “good” — but nor does he eroticize what he’s taking in. Even as he observes the implants and feels perhaps some aversion or even repulsion, he also senses the overall energy of such women, attuning to them as a totality, sensing their state and their humanity, doing nothing to make his beloved or lover lose any trust in him.
Part of the reason that most men don’t examine their big-breast interest in much depth is that they do not seriously question the appeal that large breasts holds for them. They typically take it as a given. But is it? Not necessarily! And is the appeal of big breasts sexual? No necessarily! As I’ve written elsewhere, the eroticizing of our needs (see my March 2007 Newsletter) is a common occurrence, and fasten-ation to large breasts is no exception in this context; we may have developed a charge with breasts, and large breasts in particular, for all kinds of reasons, going back to infancy, a charge that we eventually eroticized (probably in our teen years), which only increased our pull toward large breasts.
Picture an infant boy suckling, his mother’s breast comfortingly and sensually — and perhaps also massively (a milk-engorged breast being no small object to an infant) — before him, literally in his face, there for his need and his pleasure. But did this create an obsession with breasts, and big breasts in particular? Not necessarily! Something else had to happen.
Perhaps his breast-feeding was done on a schedule that didn’t work for him, so that he was left with an unrequited milk-craving too often. Or perhaps his breast-feeding was done whenever he was hungry but was cut off early, as happened with many, many mothers during the Dr. Spock era (this would leave him with a craving made all the stronger, at least for a while, by being in very close to his mother, but not having access to her breasts). Or perhaps he didn’t get breast-fed, but still knew the urge to suck, since he was, like all newborns, born to suckle; no colostrum, no milk, no bare breast against his face, but only a familiar heartbeat when his mother held him close. So much nourishment so very close by, such a rich warmth, such a soft sweet welcome, such exquisite mounds of motherly nectar so near by, signaled by the sight of cleavage or the breasts themselves — and him growing up not seeing these wondrous sources of so much, but nonetheless sensing them there, just behind the clothes and bras and don’t-touch psychoemotional walls. Such hunger here — and imagine now him eroticizing this hunger (helped in large part by his growing awareness of our cultural obsession with breasts and breast-size), and staying stuck there, and growing up wanting women to present/display the same mammary largesse. Some men flee this — like Woody Allen being pursued by a giant, milk-squirting breast, before which he finally hold up a crucifix — but many loiter in it, hooked by their lust for large, spilling-forth breasts.
Many factors conspire to create our culture’s breast fetish — and it is a fetish, in its unrelenting object-isolation and obsession — but perhaps the key one is a thwarted, infantile nourishment-craving that has been eroticized and amplified to such an extent that we are literally surrounded by it. Where the infant was faced and enfolded by the breast, we are surrounded and up to our eyeballs in it, bombarded by breasts and talk of breasts. One flash of one of Janet Jackson’s breasts at the Super Bowl was an occasion of incredible media coverage, before which all other news, including war horrors, paled. After all, a breast — a naked breast! — had been spotted for a millisecond, spurring countless parents to cover their children’s eyes. Or so the story goes. The breast is such a primal icon: Picture McDonald’s famous Golden Arches, pointing skyward, and stick a nipple atop each, and you’ll have a rough picture of what we’re up against — a ubiquitous feeding frenzy both disguised and made palatable by our eroticizing of it.
The sexualizing of our craving for breasts or, more precisely, for what breasts represent to us, shows up bigtime in teenage males — and how could they not do this, given their common lack of access to breasts, coupled with off-the-chart testosterone levels? Breasts, especially big breasts, inviting and lusciously photogenic, hold a central place in many adolescent male sexual fantasies — and let us not forget that adolescence as a stage extends far past the teen years for more than a few men. In fact, the pornographic mindset of many a teenage boy easily becomes the pornographic mindset of many a man, hyperfocusing on the titillating visuals of bare-titted women in various stages of apparent arousal, women who apparently (at least in fantasy) want him.
Many women have submitted to the adolescent male sexual fantasies that pervade our culture, as if their role is to somehow star in them, to present the kind of big-breasted allure that catalyzes and spurs masturbatory male release. But strip these fantasies of their eroticism, and what is left is but the dramatization of being fed, or being wanted, or having wide-open access to satiation-oriented pleasuring. Much of the time, small or sagging breasts just don’t get past the auditions in such fantasies, and so to the degree that women crave being desired by men (or crave the security or self-esteem or power that can arise from being so desired) they will try to make themselves more desirable to men, including by going under the knife for breast enlargement.
Me-centered men typically tend to get off on breast implants, for they’re usually overly focused on the visuals of sexuality, employing such imagery in their masturbatory rituals, whether alone or with a partner. Big breasts, artificial or not, are mostly a big turn-on for them. We-centered men are not so sure about breast implants, but may still get off on them, without, however, being particularly overt about it. They may even be critical of such artifice, scoring moral good partner points by being so sensitive to the exploitation of women, etcetera after bland etcetera, but underneath they still may lust for the silicone bazookas that they publicly decry. Where me-centered men have indulged, we-centered men have repressed.
And being-centered men? Breast implants exert no erotic pull on them and in fact are a turn-off for them. When they encounter a woman who has implants, they view her breasts in the context of all that she is, including the very forces that first drove her to seek breast enlargement. Their erotic visuals are limited, without any repression, to their partner or lover; they’ve simply outgrown the need to let their attention wander into erotic possibilities, other than with their partner or lover. (This is not to say that their sexual passion is in any way diminished — quite the opposite!) They don’t lust after women who have breast implants, nor condemn them — regardless of whatever aversion or repulsion might be stirred in them — but rather feel a natural compassion for such women, perhaps even sensing the girl in them, the girl who first felt that she was not enough as she was for males, be they boys or her father or men in general.
Most women who have breast implants already have insecurity implants. These are often covered or pushed into the background by the breast implants, but they remain in place, silenced for a time perhaps by the commotion and attention generated by the new breasts, but sooner or later their presence cannot be denied. But there are women who say to hell with getting bigger boobs, and to hell with men who want women to have bigger boobs, and I say to them: Don’t back down; don’t sell out; don’t look upon your breasts as lesser because they are smaller than their silicone cousins; don’t let adolescent male desires direct your course; don’t sacrifice the natural contours of your body so as to please men who are not yet really men; don’t let yourself get caught in the cultural trance of the generic skinny, big-titted girl-women who overpopulate the covers of most women’s magazines; and don’t, don’t, don’t base your femininity on the penile imperatives of men who have not yet embodied the deep masculine.
Have compassion for the you who wants implants; take her into your heart, mother her, love her, cradle her, invite her into her deepest places. Then you won’t have to talk her out of getting breast implants, because she will feel so good about who she is that she won’t want them (or will get rid of them if she already has them), loving her own breasts from the deep inside, feeling them from their roots, honoring them whatever the stage they are in, budding, blooming, sagging, peaceful, milk-full, lover-hungry, carrying in their unique shaping the imprint of you, the you who is already at home with all of her qualities. And to this I bow, to the little girl, the maiden, the virgin, the lover, the warrior, the queen, the juicy elder, the midwife, the spiritual adventurer, the true partner, all of them together weaving the reality of the full woman, the woman unbound, the woman who, finding freedom through limitation, is well on her way to becoming intimate with all that she is.
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August 12, 2007
My mother’s 83, my father 85. They’ve lived on the same property, loosely known by my siblings and me as “the farm,” since they got married 62 years ago. A long time, and also just a blink of an eye; they’re elderly and yet the same in so many ways as when they were young, including having aged without having grown.
When I visit the farm, driving through the stone gates and down the narrow, gravelly 200 foot driveway, flanked by rolling fields of horses and hay-to-be, I often feel as if I’ve slipped into a time warp. Just about everything seems the same as it was 20, 30, 40 years ago: the fences (for which I’d dug most of the postholes as a teen), the haybales (scratchy facsimiles of which I hoisted and stacked in suffocating barns, also as a teen), the horses (more later), the Garry Oaks, the profuse blackberry bushes, the huge yellowing lawns and lazy green strawy smell and unwavering meal rituals. Up until a few years ago, my parents’ television reception depended upon an antenna lodged in a nearby tree, which had to be twirled just right to bring in the few channels available. And not so long ago, they still used a rotary telephone. Same meat and potatoes, same desserts, same cutlery as long ago, all the old dull knives still lined up in the same old places.
Same old stories too, emanating without interruption from my father as if he’d never told them before, and as if his audience — mostly my mother — was truly interested in hearing them one more time. And now the stories get repeated much more frequently, as my father descends deeper into senile dementia. This irritates my mother, but she, as always, says nothing and just keeps on with her meal preparation.
Walking their property, I no longer sense the ghosts of younger me’s, but I still spot their footprints here and there, trudging home arm-weary from school, sprinting across a just-mowed field to catch a spiraling football, holding a horse closely bridled while my father scrapes botfly eggs off its hide. There’s a still-life quality most places on the farm, thick enough to cover and partially still the broken dreams and dusty sadness. My father missed the work he most wanted to do, becoming a school teacher (after training and unsuccessfully racing Thoroughbred racehorses) instead of a veterinarian, and my mother gave herself to the work, the hugely unrewarding and harshly criticized labor, of fitting herself to my father’s world, literally bending under it all until her back took on the shape of a topheavy questionmark, silent but so sad, eloquently speaking of all that had been left unsaid.
The dirty-white, red-roofed barn, low-lying and solid, with a dozen stables and a pile of horse manure ten feet high at one end, is older than me. I see its dirt shed-row between the heavy-bolted stables and the ditch running the length of the barn, and recall all the time I spent after school as a boy and teen cleaning out the stables and wheelbarrowing load after heavy load of ammonia-laced strawy manure down the shed-row, enroute to pitchforking it onto the steaming pile. Horses and horses and more horses, all of them Thoroughbreds, except for one quarter horse we had when I was 15 or 16.
I see my mother bent over in the kitchen, cooking and getting meals ready, as she’s done ever since she was first on the farm. I see her looking now and then through the kitchen window at the fields, taking in the horses and the green and my father fixing fences or cutting hay or doing something with the horses, and I see her removal, her distance from all of this. Despite such proximity to the horses, she never learned to ride them, never got involved with them, as she quietly staked out her domain. My father fed the horses and my mother fed him, at the same times every day for as long as I can remember. Not all that surprisingly, when they reached their 60s, he started calling her “Mommy.” This was probably a small and mixed triumph for my mother, who had been unfavorably compared by my father to his mother for a long time.
There were usually ten or so racehorses on the farm, high-strung, wild-eyed, sleekly muscular powerhouses that ran with astonishing speed and grace, but that did most everything else with what seemed to me to be an astonishing lack of intelligence, like pooping into their feedtubs so they couldn’t eat what was there. They were bred for speed, not intelligence. Most Springs, my father trained them, and then entered them in races. I helped out (being given no choice). I was quick in learning how to handle horses, quick enough not to incur criticism from my father — a rare occurrence, given his excessively critical nature. Watching the horses gallop at top speed thrilled me, sometimes bringing me to tears. Their hooves seemed to be barely touching the earth. I remember riding Bubbles, our quarterhorse, bareback with no reins, guiding her only by pulling on her mane, while she flew along at breakneck speed (she could outrun our racehorses for a quarter mile or so); that was far more of a rush than even my first times of flooring my parents’ 1957 Pontiac to maximum speed on open stretches of highway.
At the racetrack as a boy (I stopped going in my teens) I’d watch the horses parading by right before their race, prancing and snorting, quivering with wonderfully checked power, their jockeys but bits of bright color atop their backs. When the horses burst out of the starting gate, I often felt feelings that I would later label as orgasmic. Sweetly exhilarating electricity. The runner in me, though as yet largely unexpressed, exulted in the horses’ fluid, beautifully stretched-out flight around the track. A few years later, as a track athlete, I felt a similar exhilaration, infused with a burning exhaustion, when running the final turn in mile races.
Most of the time, though, I resented my father’s horses. They stood around while I worked, muddied the fields in which I played, ate through the fences that I had to help repair, made hardly any money (they were our only source of income for a while), and most of all, produced huge amounts of urine and manure in their stables, which I had to clean out daily. Rarely did they deposit their excrement in one corner of the stable; usually it was tromped in all over the place, and sometimes even was deposited in their wall-hung water buckets.
When stable-bound (usually by bad weather), they’d weave their heads from side to side, with the same kind of wired energy as animals pacing in zoo cages. With bared teeth, they’d suddenly lunge at me as I pushed the loaded wheelbarrow along the shed-row aisle in front of their stable doors. On the days when the horses stayed indoors, I had to muck out their stables while they nervously fidgeted very near me, ready to kick. It was not easy to keep them in their stable as I maneuvered the manure-filled wheelbarrow out the door. The horses never seemed to tire of trying to escape from their stables on such days, and I couldn’t blame them.
As much as I disliked them, I also sympathized with them. Before my father, we were essentially the same. When he liked a horse, he’d call it a “good doer.” When he didn’t, he’d bitterly criticize it, sometimes beating it with a rein and steel chain. Since my early years I’d received similar treatment. My favorite horse was a mare called Sally who could open her stable door by sliding free its outside bolt with her tongue. Very smart. When she got loose, she would knock down anyone who stood in her way, including my father. The other horses always veered to one side when so faced, no matter how fast they were galloping.
Another of my equine tasks was helping with the mechanics of breeding. My father owned a stallion, Connie, that he kept in a high-fenced paddock, away from the other horses. If let loose, Connie would, I was informed, kill the geldings and rape the mares. His sole companion was Billy, a huge, massively-horned billy goat who more than once got his horns beneath a man’s groin and flipped him upside down, as if in revenge for his castration. My job was to lock Billy in the stable (no small feat!) — otherwise he’d get between Connie and the selected mare — and then steady the mare (usually brought to our farm so as to benefit from Connie’s superior bloodline).
Connie would almost invariably salivate and rear, obviously eager, his penis as long as a man’s leg. The breedings were short and rough. I often had to wind up the mare’s nose in a very tight rope loop called a twitch; her resulting pain would distract her from the mounting Connie, so that he could more easily enter her. Sometimes my uncle would help out, holding up one of the mare’s front hooves, so that she couldn’t move around; one day Connie, already mounted, brought one of his front hooves in front of the mare’s neck and caught my uncle in the face, smashing his teeth. It was a hell of a job.
Most mares didn’t appear to enjoy their encounters with Connie. I could feel their fear. I felt very uncomfortable; I was assisting in what seemed to me to be rapes. Sometimes Connie would miss the mare’s vagina, and my father, loudly cursing, would manually redirect the frantically waving penis into the correct orifice. What I saw in these forced breedings, or “servicing,” made me feel nauseous. I was probably around 12 when such work began. After each servicing, I’d take the mare to a stable and my father would put his arm up her vagina, right up to his shoulder, with a stainless steel inseminator tube in his hand, pulling Connie’s semen into it, so that he could insert the tool through the mare’s cervix and shoot its contents into her uterus. Then, thank God, it was over.
I had a certain fondness for Connie as I entered my late teens, and sometimes felt what I imagined to be his loneliness. We were both fenced in. We were both painfully horny. He had his privileges, like a double stable, but he had no horse companion. My position was similar. Sometimes while sleeping I dreamt that he’d broken out of his paddock; I’d attempt to prevent his escape, but without any success. He’d charge out, snorting and tossing his magnificent head and mane, dancing on his toes, taut with energy. In one unusually vivid dream, he soared over all the fences in his way, and leapt into our house, wherein I hid terrified. He bashed down door after door, clearly seeking me. I awoke before he reached me.
I didn’t know then just how deeply I ‘d bound and fenced my own wild energy. The stallion in me paced in his narrow space, calling to me, but I was deaf and blind to him, except in my dreams. Rather than befriend the untamed energy in me, I had sought to domesticate it, to train it, to race it. I feared what I couldn’t control in myself, for self-control was the main key I’d used for so long to produce the behavior that would be the least likely to upset my father. Survival.
And yet I not only feared what I couldn’t tame in myself, but also admired it, and, unknown to myself, kept it secretly nourished. Wild horses appeared in my dreams long after I left the farm, sometimes constrained, sometimes running free, superbly potent revelations of what I was doing with my core vitality.
Again I drive down my parents’ driveway, slowly enough to raise no dust behind me, seeing the apples trees in blushing bloom and the fields blazing green. There are only 3 horses here now, none of them in training; they lounge in the distance, quietly feeding. My father is by the barn, squinting in my direction as I drive up; he probably doesn’t know it’s me. He looks at me as if I’m an intruder. I’m used to it. My mother, half a foot shorter than when she was in her 20s, comes out to greet me. I hug her, barely able to get my arms around her severely humped back.
Now my father is here too, suddenly recognizing me and smiling (dementia has its pluses) for a moment before he goes back to his tasks. I settle in, resting in the place where I once could not rest, knowing that my parents have very little time left. I have long since fully forgiven both of them. And the boy in me rests too, knowing that he is safe. My protection of him is an obvious given. The wildness in me is alive and well, needing no saddle or bridle, but just an open eye and heart, and the sweet ease of being in good hands.
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August 17, 2007
WHAT MATTERS ABOUT MATTER
Matter is more than what we typically think of as matter. There’s more to it than meets the eye, more to it than its density and mass, more to it than the popularization of it as but dumb putty to be molded by an overseeing mind.
We commonly take as a given the notion of mind over matter, but rarely consider the notion of mind as matter, or matter as externalized mind.
Matter matters. Though denser than mind, soul, or spirit, matter is not necessarily lesser than them, because it fundamentally is just the outside-ness of them crystallized into relative solidity, and without an outside, what can we say about an inside?
We have to be especially careful with language here, for what’s outside typically (or conventionally) contains what’s inside, but in the case of matter, what’s outside is contained by what’s inside, in the sense that a greater depth contains a lesser depth. And so the body does not contain the soul, but the soul contains the body; and in a even deeper sense, the body does not contain the soul, but rather is an expression of the soul. What we truly are is not making an appearance in a body, but as a body.
So let us cast a kinder eye on matter, and cease viewing it as a mere sheath or sensory integument for higher realities, for the outside-ness that characterizes it constitutes not a literal container or housing project for what’s inside, but rather an articulation or precipitated extension of what’s inside, providing a medium for that interiority or central depth to relate to what lies outside it. Matter, as part of its job description, does the dirty work, and doesn’t really mind, because that’s its nature. Someone has to take out the garbage and build the highways. Grunt work matters, and as a matter-of-fact needs to be honored as such.
Mind is itself a kind of mass-less matter, the interiority of which could be called soul, or the individualized essence of what we truly are. Soul has less of a problem with matter than does mind, because it has more of a view. The deeper inside we are, the higher our view. What’s further up the mountain can see more than what’s at lower elevations.
Inside and outside are but inseparable sides of a primal geography, together on their knees before the same old yet everfresh Mystery. When inside and outside are lovers, we know a love that cannot fail, a love that is both ocean and sail. Once again poetry has me by the jugular, and I don’t mind at all. There’s a part in The Fountain (see my review in my January 2007 Newsletter) when the Mayan priest kneels, leans back his head, and bares his throat, inviting the transfigured conquistador to cut it, so that he can be one with the Sacred. It wasn’t just a romanticized primitive moment, but rather a full-blooded signifier of extraordinary awe and sacrifice, the sort of sacrifice through which we die into a deeper Life.
Taking in a scene like this, really feeling and absorbing it, making it our own until it’s not so much ours as it is us, generates a wondrously sobering and illuminating leap through various hoops of mind, until there’s no mind left, no mapmaker, no supplier of meaning, nothing but what-really-matters. My sentences are erasing themselves almost as fast I type them. They look back and see nothing. I look back and see everything. All of it is there, both outside and inside me, for all of it was necessary to bring me into being, even though it did not all arise to bring me into being, except in the narcissistic outback of my egoity. Yes, I matter, but no more than you. Of course, my mind disagrees, but that’s its nature. Matter keeps arising, keeps passing, and through it I live, we live, whatever we may be.
I’m tempted to look back at the beginning of this rant, but don’t dare, not because I’ll be turned to stone, and not because my beloved will die, but because this wild flow, this unkempt opening and spilling, is more me than the me writing this, which is really nothing more than me letting what I’m writing outwrite me.
Now inside and outside have traded places, and no one’s making a fuss about it. What is most deeply within contains all that is outside it. Reality’s Möbius nature — one infinite surface of infinite depth — takes all the mappings of inside and outside, interiority and exteriority, higher and lower, and makes light of it. No leveling of differences here, though, no homogenizing of distinctions here, no cosmic rolling pin turning it all into one gigantic flat surface, like some great pizza awaiting its toppings and corresponding appetites.
Matter matters. But what is matter? Solid stuff? Concretized mind? A torte of atomic and subatomic particles/waves, dense and elusive and intricate enough to make our mind lick its lips? Matter is dense, but its density vanishes as we get closer and closer to it. Get really close to matter, and what you see is gravity and light in endless embrace, creating in their wake something that keeps evolving to — and beyond — the point of knowing that it is evolving. We are that something, and we are also something more, something that cannot be imagined, something that is neither inside nor outside.
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September 8, 2007
FOUND IN THE TOOLKIT FOR OPERATING A CULT
In what follows, I do not necessarily mean “cult” in the automatically pejorative, sensationalistic manner of the mainstream media — which are themselves often quite cultic in their exclusion of anything that seriously challenges them — but rather in the more general sense of a self-enclosed entity that’s both overattached to its core beliefs and all but impermeable, except perhaps superficially, to outside feedback and inside dissension.
Cults can be relatively benign, and they can also be exceedingly destructive. The range is enormous. Ego is a cult of one, plenty of couples are cults of two, and many religious and political movements are cults of many. My primary focus in this blog is on cult leaders (especially of religious/spiritual/personal growth communities) and their operational strategies, such strategies of course being not employed just by them alone, as many of those in relational hotwater can testify!
ALTITUDE INDICATOR: Wear this in a suitably prominent place, within 18 inches of your halo or wise-teacher aura, while ensuring that you don’t inadvertently wire it to your ego. To activate it, simply make sure that your students not only realize that you’re on a higher level than them, but also that their questioning of or resistance to you simply reflects their current level. That is, they’re just not developed enough to really see and understand you, and your job is to help them recognize this.
Of course, you can ease the impact of this by being friendly or somewhat self-revealing to them, perhaps even assuring them that you too are human and have flaws, without, however, bringing any real heat to yourself. If you can manage to do this with some show of humility, it will likely be even more effective. You might also consider setting up an “inner circle,” favoring those who are most strongly aligned with you, while dangling such craved-for status before the rest of your students, so as to further their own growth, if only by inspiring them to more fully embrace your teachings. Letting your students know that hierarchy is not necessarily a bad thing also helps. And last but not least, keep your altitude indicator turned on and visible, just in case some of your students forget that you’re established at a higher stage than they are.
FOCUS-REVERSAL GIZMO: To turn this on, simply make sure that your students believe, and consistently believe, that whatever they may feel critical of regarding you is in fact exactly what they feel critical of in themselves. So if you’re saying or doing something that bothers them, their job is to see what that tells them about themselves, rather than to distract themselves by bringing any focus to you. And, if you wish, you can take this a step further, and recommend that they, for their own sake and spiritual deepening, do some sort of gratitude practice for having had their own work thus pointed out to them.
If you’ve triggered anger or judgment or shadow-elements in them, this should be an occasion for appreciating rather than criticizing you. In short, make sure that they realize that whatever they don’t like about you is simply a projection of their own shortcomings onto you. If things get sticky, as with students who are trying to hold you accountable (instead of dealing with their own issues), find fault with their delivery (e.g., does it lack compassion or higher stage cognition?); it shouldn’t then take long to shift the focus back to them.
IT’S-FOR-YOUR-OWN-GOOD ENTREE: This can be served at various times, ideally right after the It’s-Such-A-Gift-To-Be-Here appetizers. What’s important is that it gets swallowed; digestion doesn’t really matter, so long as things stay down. All you have to do is remind your students that whatever you’re doing to them, however outrageous or heavy-handed, is for their own good. It may look like abuse, but it’s not, because you say so, and you of course know more, since you are, as your altitude indicator makes so obvious, operating and speaking from a higher or deeper level. Even when you are clearly and undeniably sloppy or heartless, you can tell your students that their job, their duty, their dharma, is take this as a teaching and opportunity to look at their own shadow; if they are thus spurred into a positive direction by all this, you can then make spiritual real estate out of the fact that your sloppiness or heartlessness served them, especially if you can convey this with a show of humility.
WORTH PILLS: These analgesic/euphoric wonders can be given out, sparingly of course, to reward good behavior, namely that of serving you and your work. There are a few side-effects, like moral numbness and a suspension of critical faculties, but the sweetly narcotic power of these little mindbombs more than makes up for that, all but ensuring that you’ll stay authoritatively enthroned, with your students scrambling to be close to you. Yes, your students may get addicted to these pills, but it is for a good cause, and sacrifices do need to be made if one is to truly progress. And why shouldn’t you reward and reinforce good behavior?
ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL BLINDERS: The latest models are included here, with many variations from which to choose. Who says that those in cults don’t have a choice? Serving-the-Dharma blinders are especially popular, for these allow your students to really feel that they are making a difference by being with you (no matter what you do), especially when they have learned to associate being in your company or in your community with living in truth. There are also other popular blinders, including the We-Are-Not-A-Cult blinders, which frame any and all critics of you and your community or organization as deluded or misinformed.
RESISTANCE-BUSTING CATTLE PRODS: These are, out of compassion, set to a lower voltage than those actually used for bovines, but they still pack a helluva wallop, for the good of your students and their but’s. Students need to learn that when they resist you or your teachings, they are operating from a lower stage and are simply resisting truth, life, and love, and so need a strong reminder to get back on track. Whatever catalyzes awakening. After all, you’re here to help awaken your students, aren’t you? Yes, your students may yell or scream or curl up in a ball when you zap them, but something’s got to awaken them, and you’d be derelict in your duty if you were not to use your God-given tools. And you can always follow a good hard prodding with an It’s-For-Your-Own-Good Entrée. Some may say that you are not looking after your students, and are only making excuses for your bad behavior, but they don’t have a clue as to what’s really going on. As many a parent has said as the hand or belt is swung down hard, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
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September 17, 2007
THERE’S A LOT TO SAY ABOUT HAVING NOTHING TO SAY
In the little gap
the secret abyss
the Great Emptiness
uncorked at breath’s end
is room for all
gods, humans, and ghosts alike
And out of the blue
here’s another breath
arriving all by itself
filling more than lungs
Inhale and exhale
A tide which we ride
forgetting we’re being breathed
Another breath departs
emptiness and a deeper emptiness
exhale and a truer exhale
Silence just said something
for our consideration
Don’t bury it in the translation
It’s as simple and miraculously mysterious
as our next breath
inviting us to bring it all
onto the dancefloor
(with no space for wallflowers)
so that we might more fully embrace
the art of learning our lessons by heart
while we roam these dreamlands
hungry for IT
There’s a lot to say about having nothing to say.
Silence may be the answer, but some sort of translation is often needed. Even Ramana Maharshi eventually had to say something. The situation called for it.
Translation of course usually falls far short of the original, but does this mean that we should not attempt it? Is the muted mystic resting in seemingly absolute ineffability sager than the far-from-muted mystic? Not necessarily!
More than a few spiritual seekers are in a hurry to get to the place of having nothing to say, making a grail out of silence (or at least out of sealed lips, since outer silence may not be at all indicative of inner silence). I remember back in the early 1980s seeing a few disciples of Hari Dass walking around with chalkboards and tight lips, obviously trying to emulate their master (who reportedly hadn’t and hasn’t spoken a word since 1952), conveying their needs by scrawling the appropriate words upon their chalkboard. Hari Dass, chalkboard in hand, seemed quite happy not to be speaking, but his silent disciples appeared far from happy, impaled as they were upon their spiritual ambition.
Give me the full-blooded poetry of Rumi, the crystalline eloquence of Nisargadatta, the iconoclastic rants of U.G. Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff — and yes, also give me the supremely radiant, infinitely inviting, one-look-says-it-all silence of Ramana Maharshi and Ma Anandamayi Ma. Silence does speak, and not just subtly! Even now, as these words make their way behind your forehead. Even now, as these words echo and die.
Most speech break/brakes silence, sometimes shatteringly, but there is a kind of speech that affirms and deepens silence. When your mind is quiet, your heart open, your belly loose, and your presence rooted in unshakable being, your speech will, at least to some degree, affirm and deepen silence. Instead of interrupting silence, such articulation embroiders it, effortlessly points to it, celebrates it, gives it fitting residence and lenses. Truly deep conversation, however impassioned, remains intimate with silence.
Have you ever spoken in such a manner that the space around and between (and even within) your words possessed a palpable presence? Sometimes our words can have mantric force, and not just when we are meditating or chanting. When love takes us by the tongue and brings us to our knees before the unspeakable beauty and mystery of existence, we speak in much the same way that a river does as it makes (and is made by) its way to the sea. Effortless flow, effortless grace, through which we lose face and gain more than we can imagine.
There’s a lot to say about having nothing to say. But it needs to be said in digestible bits. More than swallowing is required. Bibs are optional. There is no escaping silence. Look closely, and you’ll see that it’s both within and outside you, cupping all that you are with hyperbole-obliterating ease. Let it cradle you. Give it your mind. Give it all that you are. It won’t let you down. Rest in it, arise from it, die into it. Allow its presence to pervade all that you do. Even now, feel it touching and undoing you, including from the deep inside.
Silence is the first and last tongue. Long after our song has been sung, and long after every song has been sung, silence will persist, telling the same old tale, which no book or song can hold, but which we, in our heart of hearts, recognize, and cannot help but recognize, for we, as we truly are, are none other than its author, writing ourselves — on every scale — into the story. Now silence has me by more than the throat. Searching for one more sentence, one more burst of phrase, I see my speechless words already flaming into ashes, ever so briefly smudging a neverending sky with an impossible-to-read calligraphy, while I melt, until there’s nothing left to melt.
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September 22, 2007
There’s an emotion, a very common emotion, for which there’s no word in English (other than the extremely obscure and pronunciation-hobbled epicaricacy), and that emotion is all about taking pleasure in others’ misfortune or suffering. This may not be the kind of emotion that we readily admit to having, but who among us hasn’t felt it, and acted as if they were not feeling it?
When the suffering others have done us harm or committed a crime, we may feel justified in taking pleasure at their downfall and can even do so publicly, but at other times we may feel the same kind of pleasure when the suffering others have done nothing disturbing, in which case we ordinarily are not inclined to show our pleasure publicly (or even to admit it to ourselves).
German has a word for this emotion: Schadenfreude. This translates as harm-joy. Many other languages have a word for it, but not English. We have phrases that hover around it or hint at it, phrases that convey some of the feeling of it, but without the overt pleasure, as if we’re embarrassed to admit that it feels good. For example, we may say, “he had it coming” or “I hope she suffers” or “it was just a matter of time before he fell” — these all perhaps hinting at a certain satisfaction we might feel upon seeing someone take a spill or go downhill, but not coming very close to indicating any real pleasure. But Schadenfreude with a stiff upper lip or impassive countenance is still Schadenfreude.
Unjustified Schadenfreude is perhaps our most ubiquitous guilty pleasure, more often than not springing (unlike arguably justified Schadenfreude) from envy, an envy that pleasantly dissipates (leaving only a dark stain in the backcorners of our psyche) when we spot the fall or demise of the envied other.
The tabloids on sale at most checkout counters provide an instant Schadenfreude high — movie stars without any makeup, movie stars messing up royally, movie stars down in the dump, their tabloid travails and photos inviting us to look upon them where they are not just like us, but worse. Their fall is our rise, leavening us with tiny bursts of satisfaction and secret yumminess, like a chocolate bar downed in the mid-afternoon whilst watching a soap opera. It’s a vicarious shamefest; we’re close to the shame, but not that close, so that we can see it and feel it without having it contract or shrink or expose us. How quietly yet pointedly delicious it is to be on the other side of the glass. Someone else’s fall amplifies the fact that we have not yet thus fallen; thus does Schadenfreude give us a little hit of immunity, which in itself provides a small but noticeable shot of pleasure. A cheap buzz.
Much of Schadenfreude’s ancestry lies in the triumph we felt — and this goes back a long, long way — when the overcoming or downfall of others improved our lives in some way (and the better this felt, the more fully we’d participate in it). This can also be seen developmentally, when young children exult over getting something that another child clearly wants. Being higher up on the food chain can be a high.
As we get older and more cognitively sophisticated, our capacity for Schadenfreude deepens. We may still be driven by a certain core competitiveness and a corresponding envy, but now we can bring in finer distinctions as to what constitutes a fall in others, as well as dragging into the mix such potent ingredients as the ability to shame others. At the same time we can be more easily shamed, so we may seek to escape the raw feeling of such shame not only through attacking towards others (or attacking ourselves), but also through honing our capacity for Schadenfreude.
Our sense of justice and our Schadenfreude leanings are directly related. If we feel that others have behaved unjustly, we’re more likely to feel some Schadendfreude toward them than if we knew that they had not behaved unjustly. The enormous coverage now being given O.J. Simpson’s latest troubles is fed almost entirely by a powerfully pervasive cultural Schadenfreude. Previous coverage — obsessively excessive — given to other celebrity crashes and spills (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and so on) was also largely fed by the very same feeling. In this, CNN is simply the Jerry Springer Show in upscale clothes, pandering as it does to the very same appetites of “less civilized” broadcasts.
There are many shades of Schadenfreude, ranging from malicious delight to sweet revenge to eruditely smiling contempt, but all involve an absence of compassion, coupled with a rigid us-versus-them mentality. As such, Schadenfreude militates against forgiveness, and how could it not, given how it dehumanizes the offending or fallen other? Also, in the sense that it is a spectator sport — think of, at the extreme, Romans at the amphitheater for a day of rousingly entertaining bloodshed — Schadenfreude keeps us psychoemotionally separate from the downfall that is providing us with pleasure. Thus does it disconnect us, even as it connects us to others who are also enjoying observing the same downfall.
Schadenfreude can be brought into clearer focus by examining its opposite, mudita (a Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist term), which means sympathetic/appreciative joy — the pleasure we take in others’ successes and achievements. Many of us know this emotion in its purest form through the joy we feel over our children’s breakthroughs and triumphs, so long as we are not caught in living through their successes (which often means overemphasizing their doing well, thereby bringing unnecessary and often injurious pressure to them). Mudita has an open heart; Schadenfreude does not. Mudita does not lose touch with the humanity of others; Schadenfreude does.
So what can we do about our Schadenfreude? Well, first of all, become sufficiently aware of it so that you can name it as soon as it arises in you. Then bring your attention into the actual feeling of your Schadenfreude. Notice the contraction in its expansiveness; notice its overlap with other emotions; notice its texture, color, directionality, depth, intensity, and so on. Study it closely, getting intimate with it to the point where its arising is just one more opportunity to deepen both your self-knowledge and your relationship with others. Instead of merely judging or dissociating from your Schadenfreude, have compassion for it and for the you who tends to indulge in it.
Everyone has some Schadenfreude; all we need do is see it for what it is, and not allow it to sit in the driver’s seat. Don’t worry about getting rid of it; rather, let it sit in the backseat, giving it some playtime with mudita.
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