I've had The Afghan Whigs in my head all day today, listening to 1989's Up In It in the car, 1993's Gentlemen (one of my very favorite albums of all time) in my office, over and over and again.
The Afghan Whigs made beautifully ugly music. Crunchy, discordant guitars, raspy voice, lyrics that were dark, bitter, full of regret but somehow still hopeful.
These clips don't do them justice, but they're not so bad.
Yeah, one of the best bands ever.
I never did get to see them. I had the chance, once. And then something came up. Something stupid, something not worth missing them, but I figured I'd catch them the next time around.
Turned out, that was their last tour.
Greg Dulli's with The Twilight Singers and the Gutter Twins now. Both are good. Neither are quite The Afghan Whigs.
I'll be listening to Congregation and Black Love and Uptown Avondale tomorrow at work.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Wherein Jockeystreet Changes His Mind About Things
So, I've changed my mind on Utilitarianism.
I would call it a nuanced shift in position rather than a drastic one.
My Utilitarianism, I would say, is now descriptive rather prescriptive.
I would be saying it wrong. Those aren't exactly the right words for it.
Here's what Utilitarianism is, for those who are not entirely familiar:
Utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy that says that what is "good" or "right" is that which causes pleasure, and that what is "bad" or "wrong" is that which causes pain.
If your immediate reaction is to say "well, that sounds like a pig's philosophy," then you are wrong, but you are not alone. That is precisely what people said when John Stuart Mill wrote his very good and very short book, Utilitarianism.
They were wrong because they had a sad, perhaps piggish, idea of what constitutes "pleasure." They objected because they imagined that this was a philosophy that reduced the moral life to "sex, good; work, bad."
But pleasure, we more sophisticated types know, is more complex than that.
"Work, bad," maybe, but work pays the bills, and I like having a roof over my head, food in the cupboards, and a little spending money on the weekend, so really, in the end, "work, good."
The un-piggish, Mill pointed out, find great pleasure in conversation with their peers, in reading good books, in walks along the river, in taking good care of their bodies, and so on.
I have for a long time considered myself a Utilitarian. It makes sense to me. It provides the math that solves moral dilemmas. What choice brings the most pleasure (good) to the most people, and brings the least pain to the least people? Choose that. Sometimes it's hard to get exact figures, but it's not physics, it's moral theory; inexact figures are considered acceptable.
But then a couple of weeks ago I was on a long drive, listening to the radio, and heard an interview with the moral philosopher Michael Sandell. I'd never heard of him before, and the interview wasn't exactly riveting, but there was some stuff that stuck with me, and I'm not a Utilitarian any more.
Sandell started talking about Dick Cheney and torture. Cheney, as he noted, has made the case for torture (it sometimes feels strange to be saying that American leaders are making the case for torture) on Utilitarian grounds. Torture was the right thing, Cheney says, because it worked. Torture helped us catch bad guys. Torture helped prevent lots of bad things from happening.
Cheney's embrace of torture on Utilitarian grounds isn't what has turned me off of Utilitarianism. There are many bad Utilitarians. There are many people who use Utilitarian arguments without all the math, all the factors. Cheney is one of them. "It worked" is only part of the math that goes into the Utilitarian argument. One might also want to think about the national character, the sense of self, the ability of the people to trust the government, the effect of torture on our standing and reputation in the world, the reliability of any confession given under torture, the likelihood of getting equally useful information by less torturous means, and so on and on and on.
Sandell went on, though. In order to refute Cheney's claim that torture was right because it worked, Sandell painted a "what if" scenario that got to me.
Sure, he said (or didn't say exactly, but I'm getting his point here, if not his words), it's tough for many of us to shed tears over the torture of a Really Bad Terrorist if torturing that terrorist kept a bomb from going off and killing school children and grandmothers.
But what if torturing that terrorist didn't work? What if he was so tough and committed to our annihilation that he wouldn't talk under the roughest treatment?
What if he had a daughter? A little girl? What if he had a little girl who was nine years old? A sweet, innocent, regular little girl? And what if the way to get him to talk was to torture her? What if the way to get him to talk was to rape her? To hurt her? To do unspeakable things to her?
What if no one would ever know? It wouldn't damage the country's standing in the world. It wouldn't disgust the people at home. It wouldn't be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. No one would know. And it would save lives. It would stop that bomb from going off.
Would it be right? Or is there something other than Utility that we should be talking about? Can wrong be wrong even when it works, even when it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?
The hard math of Utilitarianism says that the kid would have to be tortured. I'm sure there are better Utilitarian philosophers than me out there (Peter Singer, maybe) who could look at that and find the hole, see the factors that I'm missing. But when I look at it, I don't see it. The math of Utilitarianism says the little girl gets the rack.
And, of course, I can't accept that. That doesn't work for me.
And now Utilitarianism doesn't work for me. It's a moral philosophy I've clung to pretty tightly for close to 20 years now. I don't yet have another moral philosophy ready to take it's place.
As I said at the start, it's a nuanced shift, not a drastic one.
I would still say that Utilitarianism is descriptive of what is good and right. In the vast majority of cases, Utilitarian math will accurately tell you what is right. But it isn't why it's right, and there are cases where the math will get it wrong.
That's a more exciting one than Utilitarianism, right? I mean, you rarely go to a popular blog and see people leaving hundreds of comments in an argument over Utilitarianism, you know?
But I don't have much to say about this one.
One, again, is an interview I heard on the radio. Don't remember who it was, don't remember when it was, don't remember what station. It was a while back. Over the summer. I won't try to go into the details much, but the guy talked about miscarriages. He talked about the sympathy we show when a woman miscarries, about the sense of loss. He asked if that sense of loss was only in the family's mind. If the sympathy was only for the loss of a potential, of a hope, or if it was sincerely for the loss of something tangible.
Done with Utilitarianism.
Done with abortion.
I would call it a nuanced shift in position rather than a drastic one.
My Utilitarianism, I would say, is now descriptive rather prescriptive.
I would be saying it wrong. Those aren't exactly the right words for it.
Here's what Utilitarianism is, for those who are not entirely familiar:
Utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy that says that what is "good" or "right" is that which causes pleasure, and that what is "bad" or "wrong" is that which causes pain.
If your immediate reaction is to say "well, that sounds like a pig's philosophy," then you are wrong, but you are not alone. That is precisely what people said when John Stuart Mill wrote his very good and very short book, Utilitarianism.
They were wrong because they had a sad, perhaps piggish, idea of what constitutes "pleasure." They objected because they imagined that this was a philosophy that reduced the moral life to "sex, good; work, bad."
But pleasure, we more sophisticated types know, is more complex than that.
"Work, bad," maybe, but work pays the bills, and I like having a roof over my head, food in the cupboards, and a little spending money on the weekend, so really, in the end, "work, good."
The un-piggish, Mill pointed out, find great pleasure in conversation with their peers, in reading good books, in walks along the river, in taking good care of their bodies, and so on.
I have for a long time considered myself a Utilitarian. It makes sense to me. It provides the math that solves moral dilemmas. What choice brings the most pleasure (good) to the most people, and brings the least pain to the least people? Choose that. Sometimes it's hard to get exact figures, but it's not physics, it's moral theory; inexact figures are considered acceptable.
But then a couple of weeks ago I was on a long drive, listening to the radio, and heard an interview with the moral philosopher Michael Sandell. I'd never heard of him before, and the interview wasn't exactly riveting, but there was some stuff that stuck with me, and I'm not a Utilitarian any more.
Sandell started talking about Dick Cheney and torture. Cheney, as he noted, has made the case for torture (it sometimes feels strange to be saying that American leaders are making the case for torture) on Utilitarian grounds. Torture was the right thing, Cheney says, because it worked. Torture helped us catch bad guys. Torture helped prevent lots of bad things from happening.
Cheney's embrace of torture on Utilitarian grounds isn't what has turned me off of Utilitarianism. There are many bad Utilitarians. There are many people who use Utilitarian arguments without all the math, all the factors. Cheney is one of them. "It worked" is only part of the math that goes into the Utilitarian argument. One might also want to think about the national character, the sense of self, the ability of the people to trust the government, the effect of torture on our standing and reputation in the world, the reliability of any confession given under torture, the likelihood of getting equally useful information by less torturous means, and so on and on and on.
Sandell went on, though. In order to refute Cheney's claim that torture was right because it worked, Sandell painted a "what if" scenario that got to me.
Sure, he said (or didn't say exactly, but I'm getting his point here, if not his words), it's tough for many of us to shed tears over the torture of a Really Bad Terrorist if torturing that terrorist kept a bomb from going off and killing school children and grandmothers.
But what if torturing that terrorist didn't work? What if he was so tough and committed to our annihilation that he wouldn't talk under the roughest treatment?
What if he had a daughter? A little girl? What if he had a little girl who was nine years old? A sweet, innocent, regular little girl? And what if the way to get him to talk was to torture her? What if the way to get him to talk was to rape her? To hurt her? To do unspeakable things to her?
What if no one would ever know? It wouldn't damage the country's standing in the world. It wouldn't disgust the people at home. It wouldn't be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. No one would know. And it would save lives. It would stop that bomb from going off.
Would it be right? Or is there something other than Utility that we should be talking about? Can wrong be wrong even when it works, even when it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?
The hard math of Utilitarianism says that the kid would have to be tortured. I'm sure there are better Utilitarian philosophers than me out there (Peter Singer, maybe) who could look at that and find the hole, see the factors that I'm missing. But when I look at it, I don't see it. The math of Utilitarianism says the little girl gets the rack.
And, of course, I can't accept that. That doesn't work for me.
And now Utilitarianism doesn't work for me. It's a moral philosophy I've clung to pretty tightly for close to 20 years now. I don't yet have another moral philosophy ready to take it's place.
As I said at the start, it's a nuanced shift, not a drastic one.
I would still say that Utilitarianism is descriptive of what is good and right. In the vast majority of cases, Utilitarian math will accurately tell you what is right. But it isn't why it's right, and there are cases where the math will get it wrong.
*******************
Here's another one:
Abortion.
That's a more exciting one than Utilitarianism, right? I mean, you rarely go to a popular blog and see people leaving hundreds of comments in an argument over Utilitarianism, you know?
But I don't have much to say about this one.
I don't think I've ever been an avid, enthusiastic supporter of abortion. It's not something that's really ever sat well with me. One of those uncomfortable, awkward things that you support, but you don't really pat yourself on the back for supporting.
What I've enthusiastically said, often, is that many members (not all, nearly) of the anti-abortion crowd are idiots, are dishonest, are not nice people. I'll stand by that.
But my unenthusiastic moral support of abortion has dried up. Completely.
There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. There's exceptions to the "don't push anybody down the stairs" rule. There are exceptions to the "don't run over Steve with your car" rule. There are always exceptions.
But I am inclined to think that those exceptions are rare, and that those exceptions do not justify the very wide open laws that we have on the books right now.
That will make me unliberal, I guess. And unfeminist. To some.
I credit two sources with this change.
One, again, is an interview I heard on the radio. Don't remember who it was, don't remember when it was, don't remember what station. It was a while back. Over the summer. I won't try to go into the details much, but the guy talked about miscarriages. He talked about the sympathy we show when a woman miscarries, about the sense of loss. He asked if that sense of loss was only in the family's mind. If the sympathy was only for the loss of a potential, of a hope, or if it was sincerely for the loss of something tangible.
I played with that thought for a while. Then I came across a post at Queen of Green. Queen of Green is a Christian vegetarian whose blog I check out once in a while. She put up a post called Let The Images Speak over the summer. It had lots of pictures. The pictures bothered me.
And there you go.
Done with Utilitarianism.
Done with abortion.
Summer of Change.
Wherein Jockeystreet Shakes His Fist At God
To top it all off, my coffee pot stopped working.
And my shoes. Dammit, my shoes. Do you understand?
I mean, no, to be fair, my coffee pot didn't stop working. It stopped working right. It stopped doing what it's supposed to do. It started doing other things entirely. Now, the clock, instead of showing the time, counts. Really fast. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Like that. Not out loud, just the little clock screen. Minutes, hours. Over and over. And while it's doing that, it won't really let you do anything else. You can keep jabbing "start brew" and it just completely ignores you. But it doesn't just count. Also the power button flashes on and off, and the "auto button" keeps setting itself, then turning itself off, and the brew strength goes from red to yellow to green to red to yellow to green. And so if you want a pot of coffee, you have to quickly jab a whole bunch of buttons in rapid succession so that it gets sort of confused, and for just this short window of time it stops going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then you have to jab the "start brew" (jab it, jab it hard) before it gets all wound up again, and maybe it'll start making your coffee. Then you've got to unplug it again as soon as its done or it will randomly try to start another brew and with no water in the tank will make these sickly dry gurgly sounds.
Damn coffee pot. Didn't need this. What I needed was a damn cup of coffee. And yeah, I got that. I got a few cups. But I needed it in a relaxing manner.
Because you may not have noticed this about me, and when I'm done saying it you're probably going to be like "no, no, I can't believe that that could be true," but it is true:
I have issues with stress.
And I don't even like saying that. I don't like saying that because "stress" seems like the wrong word. When I think "stress," I always get a visual of a squirrel in the back yard, holding on to an acorn or a peanut or something, and the neighbor's cat has just come out of the house, and the squirrel's eyes are all darting around and he's perfectly still except that you can pretty much see his heart beating through his fur, and he's looking like, "oh man, cat, the cat's out, aw crap, he doesn't see me, no he doesn't see me, crap the cat's out, oh man, I'm so screwed, Martha was right, didn't need any peanuts, should listened, aw crap."
"Stress" to me is like "imminent danger." I think stress, and I think that, you know, the strong possibility of losing your job is an occasion for stress. And I'm probably not going to lose my job. Some days I wish maybe I would, but I probably won't. I think being buried in debt, not being able to afford the mortgage or car repairs is stressful, but, though it's somehow awkward for me to say this, though I somehow feel sort of bad about it, really, I'm doing okay on that front. We're comfortable. No cruises, no sports cars, but we're doing pretty alright. I think stress, and I think about marriages that are falling apart with all this screaming and yelling and infidelity, but you know, my wife and I get along pretty well. Admittedly, I can be a hard person to live with, and so I wouldn't say that married life is without it's occasional strains, but for the most part, I think we like each other, we like to sometimes dance in the living room and I have even been known to say sweet things from time to time. Or when I think about stress, I think about the boss that screams at you and the deadlines that are bearing down that you just can't meet. But my boss doesn't really scream at me. My boss-- and my bosses' boss, and his boss-- all seem to like me and respect me, and they generally say very nice things to and about me. When I screw up, I certainly hear about it. But I don't screw up too badly too often. And I don't really have much trouble on deadlines; I sort of have the knack for what I'm doing, and while I won't blow anyone's mind with my creative new approaches to the field, I'm a pretty good soldier, know how to get things done, can take orders well enough, can remember multi-step directions and such.
So "stress" strikes me as sort of the wrong word.
When I say that I have issues with stress, I guess that what I mean is that I am prone to bouts of existential torment. Melancholy. Despair. And a general sort of dizzying nervousness.
I mean, the world, if you haven't noticed, is pretty completely fucked up. I think I've made that point often enough. I usually start with a statement like "Everything Is Wrong" or end by saying that we all really, really, really need to "leave Egypt." The world is pretty completely fucked up and I don't have cable, so it's hard to stay distracted, hard not to notice. And noticing can really bring you down. Lead you into a quagmire of existential torment, melancholy, despair.
And No Sweat is going out of business. Dammit, but No Sweat is going out of business. I didn't need that today. I didn't need that at all.
I have two pairs of quasi-dressy work shoes (one brown, one black; they go equally poorly with jeans or with a suit). I used to buy very cheap sneakers from Payless or wherever, spent maybe $20 per pair. They always fell apart. I don't use leather, and so I'm pretty limited in what I can find in a normal shoe store that meets my enlightened ethical standards. I always bought those cheap fake leather shoes, they always fell apart in seven or eight months, my feet always hurt. Finally, I decided to order what I considered wickedly expensive shoes from a place called Moo Shoes. Vegan, sweatshop free, really comfortable, nice looking shoes. A little over $120, which makes me kind of sick, but in reality, since they last for several years, it's not much more than I was paying before.
So I've had these "Earth Vegan" shoes for several years now, and I was sitting in the office the other day, happened to look down at my feet, and there's this huge damn hole in the sole of my shoe. A big crack, a crevasse. All the way across. So that if it rains, my socks will be soaked. Then I looked at the shoe on the other foot. Same damn thing. Both shoes. Shot. Wearable, for now, but I need some new shoes.
That got me thinking about my sneakers. I have some olive high tops from No Sweat, the coolest vegan friendly sweatshop-free shoes and t-shirts place on the web. I love those sneakers. Love them. Have loved them long and hard enough that they are now in pretty rough shape. So I figured, "hey, I'm buying shoes, what the hell." I went to No Sweat. And they're going out of business. They don't have those olive shoes in my size anymore. Just kids sizes, basically.
So, you know, I'm experiencing some existential turmoil already, okay? The kind where I'm convinced that happiness is an illusion, life is pain and despair, etc, etc. 10th grade-writing-on-black-paper-with-black-ink-while-listening-to-The-Cure-in-the-dark stuff. And now my coffee pot is broken, my black dress shoes have crevasses in them (and I've got a damn Chamber dinner to go to next week!), and No Sweat is going out of businesses, which means I'll never have another pair of those olive high tops.
Nothing for it but to lean out the window, stare into the sky, get a face full of cold rain, and shake your fist at God.
Am I right?
It's been a hell of a couple of weeks. My very favorite kind of stress (existential torment, whatever) is the kind where nothing is actually wrong. It's great when people know you're down, when you clearly haven't slept in weeks, when people can sense you're not entirely present during a conversation, and then, when asked what's wrong, you get to say "well, nothing actually." "Nothing actually" being a better way to answer your secretary on a Monday morning than "has it ever occurred to you that it's all wrong, that it all has to change, and that it all has to start with me?"
I got an email from a good friend that I don't see nearly often enough the other day. He told me he was going through a "rough patch." As I was in what you might call a "rough patch" myself, that really got me thinking. He's a good guy. A very good guy. One of the better ones I know. It seems to me, best as I can put it together, that he's been in this rough patch off and on for a good four or five years now. Before that, of course, we were young and stupid, and it was all a rough patch, but it didn't matter. Now that we're old and responsible, we're supposed to have this stuff figured out.
In his email, he mentioned another friend, another rough patch. Another good friend, good guy, someone who could never really quite get his shit together, now from what I understand going off the deep end a little with drugs that he's not equipped to handle, lady-friends who don't have his best interests in mind, shitty jobs, bad health, bad choices.
Which got me thinking about another friend, the one who has a panic attack every day before he goes to work, who hates his job so much that it makes him feel a little bit like he's going to die, who is so buried in debt that he can't even play with the idea of quitting.
Or another, who always seems so happy and put together on the surface, who has it figured out, but spends days at a time in bed during his fits of depression, can't work, can't be around people. Another good guy. With rough patches.
Or the old friend who never could quite get out of our twenty-somethings, could never exactly move on, could never meet that right person or find that right job or discover that right purpose in life, is still sleeping it off in the parking lot before driving home from the bar, still getting pulled over for weaving, still wanting to hit that loudmouth on the other side of the room, still angry, still metal... but getting gray, getting tired, getting too old for it, very aware of it.
And here's the thing: I don't expect life to be "fair." I know better. Really. I'm an idealist, but I know how it is.
I look at people lately, though, and for too many, I have to ask if life is "good." And I feel angry. I feel disappointed. I feel like they deserve better. I've come to realize that almost everyone I know needs medication to get through a stressful day, or looks at themselves in the mirror and hates their appearance, or is full of debilitating self-doubt, or hides in a dark room until the depression passes, or is terrified of the future, or drinks themself to oblivion most nights of the week, or has to go into the bathroom to get composure after a panic attack, or, or, or, on and on and on.
And I think, "really?" I think, "is this it? is this how it's supposed to be? is this what we've got? is this it?"
The idealist in me doesn't necessarily want fair, but it sure as shit wants "better." The idealist in me can't believe that this is the best the world has to offer, that this is what it means to be here, to be alive. This aching melancholy bullshit isn't by a long shot "enough."
And then, for some reason, I think of Lillian.
Lillian was just about the coolest person I ever knew.
I don't remember how I met Lillian. I remember where I met her, and when. I was in my early twenties, 21, maybe 22. I was working in a hospital cafeteria, serving food on the line to staff and visitors. And Lillian had a friend, Vivian, who had recently been admitted to the long term care floor. Vivian, I think, was pushing 90. Lillian was younger, maybe 60, maybe 65. I'm bad with ages, I don't know.
I can't remember how Lillian and I started talking, but I would sit with her often for coffee on my breaks. She took me at least once to see Vivian, who was somehow affiliated with Houghton College (the school I'd dropped out of a few times).
Lillian didn't say a lot. She talked, and she asked me questions about my life, and she commented on that, but she used only the words that were necessary. And somehow she said everything with a certain "authority." She said things like she knew them to be true.
I enjoyed Lillian. I wrote her into one of the songs I was playing back then.
I have forgotten most of the things she said, but one line from one conversation stands out, always will.
"Peace?" she said. "Peace is an illusion. There is no peace."
She said it like she meant it. With authority. Like she knew it was true.
Maybe it's strange, but I find that thought very comforting right now. Peaceful, almost.
Maybe that' the answer to my melancholy, my disappointed idealism. Maybe that's why others go through "rough patches" but still call themselves happy, while I dive headfirst into despair, refuse to be consoled, shake my fist at God. They get that there is no peace, are okay with it, and move on.
And my shoes. Dammit, my shoes. Do you understand?
I mean, no, to be fair, my coffee pot didn't stop working. It stopped working right. It stopped doing what it's supposed to do. It started doing other things entirely. Now, the clock, instead of showing the time, counts. Really fast. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Like that. Not out loud, just the little clock screen. Minutes, hours. Over and over. And while it's doing that, it won't really let you do anything else. You can keep jabbing "start brew" and it just completely ignores you. But it doesn't just count. Also the power button flashes on and off, and the "auto button" keeps setting itself, then turning itself off, and the brew strength goes from red to yellow to green to red to yellow to green. And so if you want a pot of coffee, you have to quickly jab a whole bunch of buttons in rapid succession so that it gets sort of confused, and for just this short window of time it stops going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then you have to jab the "start brew" (jab it, jab it hard) before it gets all wound up again, and maybe it'll start making your coffee. Then you've got to unplug it again as soon as its done or it will randomly try to start another brew and with no water in the tank will make these sickly dry gurgly sounds.
Damn coffee pot. Didn't need this. What I needed was a damn cup of coffee. And yeah, I got that. I got a few cups. But I needed it in a relaxing manner.
Because you may not have noticed this about me, and when I'm done saying it you're probably going to be like "no, no, I can't believe that that could be true," but it is true:
I have issues with stress.
And I don't even like saying that. I don't like saying that because "stress" seems like the wrong word. When I think "stress," I always get a visual of a squirrel in the back yard, holding on to an acorn or a peanut or something, and the neighbor's cat has just come out of the house, and the squirrel's eyes are all darting around and he's perfectly still except that you can pretty much see his heart beating through his fur, and he's looking like, "oh man, cat, the cat's out, aw crap, he doesn't see me, no he doesn't see me, crap the cat's out, oh man, I'm so screwed, Martha was right, didn't need any peanuts, should listened, aw crap."
"Stress" to me is like "imminent danger." I think stress, and I think that, you know, the strong possibility of losing your job is an occasion for stress. And I'm probably not going to lose my job. Some days I wish maybe I would, but I probably won't. I think being buried in debt, not being able to afford the mortgage or car repairs is stressful, but, though it's somehow awkward for me to say this, though I somehow feel sort of bad about it, really, I'm doing okay on that front. We're comfortable. No cruises, no sports cars, but we're doing pretty alright. I think stress, and I think about marriages that are falling apart with all this screaming and yelling and infidelity, but you know, my wife and I get along pretty well. Admittedly, I can be a hard person to live with, and so I wouldn't say that married life is without it's occasional strains, but for the most part, I think we like each other, we like to sometimes dance in the living room and I have even been known to say sweet things from time to time. Or when I think about stress, I think about the boss that screams at you and the deadlines that are bearing down that you just can't meet. But my boss doesn't really scream at me. My boss-- and my bosses' boss, and his boss-- all seem to like me and respect me, and they generally say very nice things to and about me. When I screw up, I certainly hear about it. But I don't screw up too badly too often. And I don't really have much trouble on deadlines; I sort of have the knack for what I'm doing, and while I won't blow anyone's mind with my creative new approaches to the field, I'm a pretty good soldier, know how to get things done, can take orders well enough, can remember multi-step directions and such.
So "stress" strikes me as sort of the wrong word.
When I say that I have issues with stress, I guess that what I mean is that I am prone to bouts of existential torment. Melancholy. Despair. And a general sort of dizzying nervousness.
I mean, the world, if you haven't noticed, is pretty completely fucked up. I think I've made that point often enough. I usually start with a statement like "Everything Is Wrong" or end by saying that we all really, really, really need to "leave Egypt." The world is pretty completely fucked up and I don't have cable, so it's hard to stay distracted, hard not to notice. And noticing can really bring you down. Lead you into a quagmire of existential torment, melancholy, despair.
And No Sweat is going out of business. Dammit, but No Sweat is going out of business. I didn't need that today. I didn't need that at all.
I have two pairs of quasi-dressy work shoes (one brown, one black; they go equally poorly with jeans or with a suit). I used to buy very cheap sneakers from Payless or wherever, spent maybe $20 per pair. They always fell apart. I don't use leather, and so I'm pretty limited in what I can find in a normal shoe store that meets my enlightened ethical standards. I always bought those cheap fake leather shoes, they always fell apart in seven or eight months, my feet always hurt. Finally, I decided to order what I considered wickedly expensive shoes from a place called Moo Shoes. Vegan, sweatshop free, really comfortable, nice looking shoes. A little over $120, which makes me kind of sick, but in reality, since they last for several years, it's not much more than I was paying before.
So I've had these "Earth Vegan" shoes for several years now, and I was sitting in the office the other day, happened to look down at my feet, and there's this huge damn hole in the sole of my shoe. A big crack, a crevasse. All the way across. So that if it rains, my socks will be soaked. Then I looked at the shoe on the other foot. Same damn thing. Both shoes. Shot. Wearable, for now, but I need some new shoes.
That got me thinking about my sneakers. I have some olive high tops from No Sweat, the coolest vegan friendly sweatshop-free shoes and t-shirts place on the web. I love those sneakers. Love them. Have loved them long and hard enough that they are now in pretty rough shape. So I figured, "hey, I'm buying shoes, what the hell." I went to No Sweat. And they're going out of business. They don't have those olive shoes in my size anymore. Just kids sizes, basically.
So, you know, I'm experiencing some existential turmoil already, okay? The kind where I'm convinced that happiness is an illusion, life is pain and despair, etc, etc. 10th grade-writing-on-black-paper-with-black-ink-while-listening-to-The-Cure-in-the-dark stuff. And now my coffee pot is broken, my black dress shoes have crevasses in them (and I've got a damn Chamber dinner to go to next week!), and No Sweat is going out of businesses, which means I'll never have another pair of those olive high tops.
Nothing for it but to lean out the window, stare into the sky, get a face full of cold rain, and shake your fist at God.
Am I right?
It's been a hell of a couple of weeks. My very favorite kind of stress (existential torment, whatever) is the kind where nothing is actually wrong. It's great when people know you're down, when you clearly haven't slept in weeks, when people can sense you're not entirely present during a conversation, and then, when asked what's wrong, you get to say "well, nothing actually." "Nothing actually" being a better way to answer your secretary on a Monday morning than "has it ever occurred to you that it's all wrong, that it all has to change, and that it all has to start with me?"
I got an email from a good friend that I don't see nearly often enough the other day. He told me he was going through a "rough patch." As I was in what you might call a "rough patch" myself, that really got me thinking. He's a good guy. A very good guy. One of the better ones I know. It seems to me, best as I can put it together, that he's been in this rough patch off and on for a good four or five years now. Before that, of course, we were young and stupid, and it was all a rough patch, but it didn't matter. Now that we're old and responsible, we're supposed to have this stuff figured out.
In his email, he mentioned another friend, another rough patch. Another good friend, good guy, someone who could never really quite get his shit together, now from what I understand going off the deep end a little with drugs that he's not equipped to handle, lady-friends who don't have his best interests in mind, shitty jobs, bad health, bad choices.
Which got me thinking about another friend, the one who has a panic attack every day before he goes to work, who hates his job so much that it makes him feel a little bit like he's going to die, who is so buried in debt that he can't even play with the idea of quitting.
Or another, who always seems so happy and put together on the surface, who has it figured out, but spends days at a time in bed during his fits of depression, can't work, can't be around people. Another good guy. With rough patches.
Or the old friend who never could quite get out of our twenty-somethings, could never exactly move on, could never meet that right person or find that right job or discover that right purpose in life, is still sleeping it off in the parking lot before driving home from the bar, still getting pulled over for weaving, still wanting to hit that loudmouth on the other side of the room, still angry, still metal... but getting gray, getting tired, getting too old for it, very aware of it.
And here's the thing: I don't expect life to be "fair." I know better. Really. I'm an idealist, but I know how it is.
I look at people lately, though, and for too many, I have to ask if life is "good." And I feel angry. I feel disappointed. I feel like they deserve better. I've come to realize that almost everyone I know needs medication to get through a stressful day, or looks at themselves in the mirror and hates their appearance, or is full of debilitating self-doubt, or hides in a dark room until the depression passes, or is terrified of the future, or drinks themself to oblivion most nights of the week, or has to go into the bathroom to get composure after a panic attack, or, or, or, on and on and on.
And I think, "really?" I think, "is this it? is this how it's supposed to be? is this what we've got? is this it?"
The idealist in me doesn't necessarily want fair, but it sure as shit wants "better." The idealist in me can't believe that this is the best the world has to offer, that this is what it means to be here, to be alive. This aching melancholy bullshit isn't by a long shot "enough."
And then, for some reason, I think of Lillian.
Lillian was just about the coolest person I ever knew.
I don't remember how I met Lillian. I remember where I met her, and when. I was in my early twenties, 21, maybe 22. I was working in a hospital cafeteria, serving food on the line to staff and visitors. And Lillian had a friend, Vivian, who had recently been admitted to the long term care floor. Vivian, I think, was pushing 90. Lillian was younger, maybe 60, maybe 65. I'm bad with ages, I don't know.
I can't remember how Lillian and I started talking, but I would sit with her often for coffee on my breaks. She took me at least once to see Vivian, who was somehow affiliated with Houghton College (the school I'd dropped out of a few times).
Lillian didn't say a lot. She talked, and she asked me questions about my life, and she commented on that, but she used only the words that were necessary. And somehow she said everything with a certain "authority." She said things like she knew them to be true.
I enjoyed Lillian. I wrote her into one of the songs I was playing back then.
I have forgotten most of the things she said, but one line from one conversation stands out, always will.
"Peace?" she said. "Peace is an illusion. There is no peace."
She said it like she meant it. With authority. Like she knew it was true.
Maybe it's strange, but I find that thought very comforting right now. Peaceful, almost.
Maybe that' the answer to my melancholy, my disappointed idealism. Maybe that's why others go through "rough patches" but still call themselves happy, while I dive headfirst into despair, refuse to be consoled, shake my fist at God. They get that there is no peace, are okay with it, and move on.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Moral Question
This is one that haunts me. Has for a long time.
Here's the situation:
Imagine yourself out walking on one of those sunny, bright blue, happy days. Birds are singing, darks are barking in the distance, butterflies flit by, etc, etc. I don't know where you're going, exactly, but it's someplace that ranks as a certain kind of "important." Maybe you're on your way to sign paperwork to buy your first house, it's 2:00, and 2:45 is the deadline. Maybe your on your way to your sister's wedding or your big, big job interview. Nothing life and death here, but important stuff for sure.
The path you're walking on runs alongside a pond or a small lake, and here and there you can see people sailing, tubing, having a good time. There are two other healthy adults on the path with you, going the same direction at pretty much the same pace.
And then you here a splash, and a scream, and a couple more splashes, and you see that not too far out from the shore a little boat has capsized, and there are three children splashing around, screaming that they cannot swim. You look, and you can't see there parents. In fact, you can't see anyone anywhere who could possibly get to them in time to save them, except for you and those other two healthy adults on the path.
So what do you do?
The answer is obvious, right? Being a healthy adult yourself, you run and jump into the water, swim out to one of those kids, and pull her safely to the shore. The other two walkers do the same. Everybody does their part. Problem solved. Horrible, horrible tragedy averted. Everybody's picture gets in the paper, everybody feels really good.
Except here's the thing:
The other two don't stop. They keep on walking. They, too, are on their way to weddings or birthday parties or really big interviews or first dates, and they've decided that they can't be sidetracked, they have priorities, they have their own lives to live.
And so it's just you.
And you can still do your part. You can still jump in the water, swim out to the boat, pull that little girl to shore, and say "I did my part." You might even get to your Really Important Thing on time. Wet, but on time. And that's good. That's great. You've done your part. Good for you.
But somehow, it doesn't work out. It doesn't add up. Somehow, once you're in the water, once you know what you've got to do, you can't just do your part and call it enough. Pointing at the backs of the ones who kept walking on won't justify you, won't give you absolution, won't get you out of this. You won't get your picture in the paper. You won't be a hero. What's more, you won't be able to look at yourself in the mirror. You won't be "good." Not even close. Not at all.
Once you've got that little girl to shore, you've got to swim back out for her brother. Because there's still time. You can do it. And once you've got him to shore, you've got to swim back out for their cousin. And it means you'll miss that wedding, or that interview, or that limited time offer. It means you'll get a mouthful of water. It means you'll be tired and sore. But what the hell else can you do? What the hell else can you do when not everybody agrees to do their part? You've got to go in for all three.
And okay. So you can do that.
So rewind.
You're on a path, it's a sunny, blue day with butterflies and barking dogs, and you're on your way to this interview, chance of a lifetime thing, the guy agreed to see you before he flies out in about twenty minutes. And there's four other people on the path, going your way. And there's these five kids in a boat, not too far out from shore. And you hear a series of splashes, and some cries for help, and the other four keep walking...
Or, you're on a path, on your way to your daughter's wedding, and there's nine other people on the path, and there are the three boats out there, and they collide, and then there are these ten kids in the water...
Or... or... there's twenty, there's thirty people on the path...
The question that comes at me over and over again is "where does it end?"
Doing our part isn't it. Not it at all. Not close to the right answer. Not anywhere in the vicinity. Can't be.
None of the people that we pretend to admire get our admiration because they did their part. None of them. Not Jesus, or Gandhi, or King, or Mother Theresa, not any of them.
And none of those people who have told us with "authority" how we should be living our lives have told us to do our part. None of them.
The examples and the directives have gone far, far beyond that.
And so my question, as best as I can word it, is "where does it end?"
Because I've really been trying to do my part. Knowing that that is woefully inadequate, knowing that that is not even on the field of adequacy, where do I go next?
How many kids do you swim out for? Is there any satisfactory answer that leaves one in the water if you've still got an ounce of strength, could still make another trip? Maybe you can't throw your life away, because you've got children, a spouse, people who count on you. But you can make one more trip and get safely back, right? You've got more in you, right? And can you stop like that?
And maybe asking this question is in itself an inexcusable cop-out. Maybe I only ask the question because I already know the answer. Maybe I only ask the question because I know, and asking, pretending not to know, is easier then the doing. Maybe Kierkegaard is right.
"Take any words in the New Testament," he said, "and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined."
Here's the situation:
Imagine yourself out walking on one of those sunny, bright blue, happy days. Birds are singing, darks are barking in the distance, butterflies flit by, etc, etc. I don't know where you're going, exactly, but it's someplace that ranks as a certain kind of "important." Maybe you're on your way to sign paperwork to buy your first house, it's 2:00, and 2:45 is the deadline. Maybe your on your way to your sister's wedding or your big, big job interview. Nothing life and death here, but important stuff for sure.
The path you're walking on runs alongside a pond or a small lake, and here and there you can see people sailing, tubing, having a good time. There are two other healthy adults on the path with you, going the same direction at pretty much the same pace.
And then you here a splash, and a scream, and a couple more splashes, and you see that not too far out from the shore a little boat has capsized, and there are three children splashing around, screaming that they cannot swim. You look, and you can't see there parents. In fact, you can't see anyone anywhere who could possibly get to them in time to save them, except for you and those other two healthy adults on the path.
So what do you do?
The answer is obvious, right? Being a healthy adult yourself, you run and jump into the water, swim out to one of those kids, and pull her safely to the shore. The other two walkers do the same. Everybody does their part. Problem solved. Horrible, horrible tragedy averted. Everybody's picture gets in the paper, everybody feels really good.
Except here's the thing:
The other two don't stop. They keep on walking. They, too, are on their way to weddings or birthday parties or really big interviews or first dates, and they've decided that they can't be sidetracked, they have priorities, they have their own lives to live.
And so it's just you.
And you can still do your part. You can still jump in the water, swim out to the boat, pull that little girl to shore, and say "I did my part." You might even get to your Really Important Thing on time. Wet, but on time. And that's good. That's great. You've done your part. Good for you.
But somehow, it doesn't work out. It doesn't add up. Somehow, once you're in the water, once you know what you've got to do, you can't just do your part and call it enough. Pointing at the backs of the ones who kept walking on won't justify you, won't give you absolution, won't get you out of this. You won't get your picture in the paper. You won't be a hero. What's more, you won't be able to look at yourself in the mirror. You won't be "good." Not even close. Not at all.
Once you've got that little girl to shore, you've got to swim back out for her brother. Because there's still time. You can do it. And once you've got him to shore, you've got to swim back out for their cousin. And it means you'll miss that wedding, or that interview, or that limited time offer. It means you'll get a mouthful of water. It means you'll be tired and sore. But what the hell else can you do? What the hell else can you do when not everybody agrees to do their part? You've got to go in for all three.
And okay. So you can do that.
So rewind.
You're on a path, it's a sunny, blue day with butterflies and barking dogs, and you're on your way to this interview, chance of a lifetime thing, the guy agreed to see you before he flies out in about twenty minutes. And there's four other people on the path, going your way. And there's these five kids in a boat, not too far out from shore. And you hear a series of splashes, and some cries for help, and the other four keep walking...
Or, you're on a path, on your way to your daughter's wedding, and there's nine other people on the path, and there are the three boats out there, and they collide, and then there are these ten kids in the water...
Or... or... there's twenty, there's thirty people on the path...
The question that comes at me over and over again is "where does it end?"
Doing our part isn't it. Not it at all. Not close to the right answer. Not anywhere in the vicinity. Can't be.
None of the people that we pretend to admire get our admiration because they did their part. None of them. Not Jesus, or Gandhi, or King, or Mother Theresa, not any of them.
And none of those people who have told us with "authority" how we should be living our lives have told us to do our part. None of them.
The examples and the directives have gone far, far beyond that.
And so my question, as best as I can word it, is "where does it end?"
Because I've really been trying to do my part. Knowing that that is woefully inadequate, knowing that that is not even on the field of adequacy, where do I go next?
How many kids do you swim out for? Is there any satisfactory answer that leaves one in the water if you've still got an ounce of strength, could still make another trip? Maybe you can't throw your life away, because you've got children, a spouse, people who count on you. But you can make one more trip and get safely back, right? You've got more in you, right? And can you stop like that?
And maybe asking this question is in itself an inexcusable cop-out. Maybe I only ask the question because I already know the answer. Maybe I only ask the question because I know, and asking, pretending not to know, is easier then the doing. Maybe Kierkegaard is right.
"Take any words in the New Testament," he said, "and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined."
Vision, Not Programs
I've written from time to time here on the whole notion of "vision, not programs."
Today, on my drive into work, an example of the sort of thing I mean by this occurred to me.
It has been 7 years, 2 months, and 5 days (roughly) since I've smoked a cigarette.
Prior to that, I smoked a lot of cigarettes.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes, and really, really liked cigarettes. Three packs a day, for a while there.
I knew, of course, as just about everybody these days knows, that smoking cigarettes was a bad idea, and so I wanted to quit. Knew that I should quit. Tried to quit. Over and over again. In an effort to quit, I engaged in a number of programs, all of which failed miserably.
I chewed the gum. Nicorette. I chewed an awful lot of that gum over a period of about four months. When I think back on it, I can still taste it... this tart, sort of piercing flavor that would just sort of almost numb my mouth, throw chills up and down my spine as the lovely, lovely nicotine hit. The gum was expensive, almost as expensive (from what I remember) as cigarettes. And it wasn't nearly as cool. I mean, you couldn't lean against the bar looking all pensive and serious and make some witty, jaded philosophical point while smacking on a piece of Nicorette the way you could with a cigarette. And before too long I learned that chewing on two pieces of Nicorette while chain smoking could make one feel light-headed and nauseous, so I quit the Nicorette for my own health.
And I tried the Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant, has a side-effect which prevents the body from "processing" nicotine. You can smoke and smoke and smoke, but you won't get that "fix," that good, good feeling. The idea is that if you're getting nothing out of it, you'll just stop smoking. That didn't work for me. Not being able to process the nicotine just made me sort of angry, made me try harder. I smoked more and more and more, hoping that just one more cigarette and I'd break through that barrier. Add to that the fact that a second side-effect of the drug, for some, is the sensation of bugs crawling under the skin, this just absolutely awful sub dermal itchiness that cannot possibly be scratched. No fun at all. So I quit the Wellbutrin.
I tried hanging a picture of a diseased lung on my refrigerator door for a while. That depressed me every time I got thirsty and went to the fridge. When I got depressed, I usually sat on the porch and smoked.
I bought a carton of cheap, generic cigarettes. Not so much to save money, but because I generally smoked quality cigarettes, and thought that cheap, generic cigarettes were disgusting. I figured I would smoke fewer cigarettes this way, and might start winding down to none at all. I ended up hating them so much that I smoked them as fast as possible so that I could get through the whole carton and buy something good again. The carton disappeared in no time at all.
And of course I went through that "not buying" phase, where you don't buy your own pack, you just bum them here and there when you really need them. But I had a lot of generous friends, and even more not-so-terribly-bright friends who always left their packs lying around when I was over and made occasional comments like "man, I've been smoking an awful lot lately, I think I'm going through two packs a day and I don't even know how."
Somebody-- my sister, maybe?-- bought me a pack of those fake foam cigarettes. They come in a regular pack, look real, but there's no tobacco in them, just styrofoam or something all the way through. You're supposed to suck on them like you're really smoking, you can have them between your fingers, if you puff you get a little blast of menthol (I never smoked menthols, but you need to get something when you puff these things). They were kind of lame, but I tried. I was delivering pizza one night and I'd been alternating on runs between smoking a cigarette and puffing on one of these things. And then, in the dark, I reached down to the pack, thought I was grabbing a real cigarette, lit my lighter, inhaled, and nearly veered off the road, sucking in burning, mentholated styrofoam. Absolutely horrible. The pack of fakes went in the garbage as soon as I returned to the store.
The most successful program was the "sheer force of will" program. I was living with my on-again/off-again girlfriend at that time, and she really wanted me to quit, and my family really wanted me to quit, and I couldn't smoke in the apartment anyway, and it was expensive, and I wasn't hanging out in bars as much so there wasn't quite as much temptation, so I figured what the hell. I locked myself in a room for the weekend, away from anyone I could scream at, and fought it out. Resisted the urge. The first couple of weeks were hard, but after that, it wasn't so bad. I went a full six months without a single smoke, and felt pretty good about that. There were times when I wanted one. I mean, those were stressful times. Living with someone who I was pretty sure didn't actually like me very much, the band that I thought was going to be really, really huge had broken up before we'd even made our first record, I was adjusting to having a grown up job with normal morning hours, I was gaining weight. But I did it. Six months. And then I discovered that my lady friend was the line connecting all eight points of a twisted love octagon and I sort of got a little upset. I packed her stuff in the middle of the night, called her younger sister to come pick me up, and burned through most of a pack of Marlboros in an hour in one of my favorite bars.
None of my "programs" for quitting worked. They didn't work because as much as I kinda, sorta mostly knew that I should quit, on a deeper level, I really didn't want to. I really, really liked smoking. I liked complaining about smoking, sure. I liked thinking that it was a waste of money, bad for my health, a terrible habit. But I also just liked sitting there with a cigarette between my fingers. When I was smoking, I liked it. When I wasn't smoking, I wanted one.
Until one day I didn't want one any more.
I didn't try to quit. I mean, yes, I still had in the back of my mind the notion that I was going to eventually quit. But I wasn't working at it, wasn't making any effort.
I was dating a new, nice lady (the one that I married), and I hadn't told her that I was a smoker. She'd been a straight-edge girl back in her college days, and though she wasn't quite that hardcore about things anymore, I figured she'd have a low opinion of smokers, so I didn't mention it to her. I went outside to clean my car, to make it smell all fresh and nice so she wouldn't ask me why I let my friends smoke in the car. I took a white rag and cleaned the cloth ceiling on the passenger side. It came back a little gray, a little grubby. I went around to the other side and cleaned the ceiling above the driver's seat. It came back thick, black, chalky.
"Hmmm," I thought.
I set everything down, then went on sat on the trunk of my car, looking out into the street. I lit a cigarette, smoked it slowly, and processed that. Lit another one, smoked it. Enjoyed it. Then I threw the remainder of the pack in my garbage. And that was that.
7 years, 2 months, 5 days. Temptations, occasionally, but not very significant ones.
Programs, in my experience, don't work. Not in the long run, anyway.
What we need is a new vision. A new set of wants. A new understanding of our reality.
The difficult thing, I guess, is that we can't always set the schedule for that sort of thing. We can be open to it, we can set the conditions that might allow it, but we can't make it happen. That can be frustrating. But, as far as I can tell, there's really no other way.
Today, on my drive into work, an example of the sort of thing I mean by this occurred to me.
It has been 7 years, 2 months, and 5 days (roughly) since I've smoked a cigarette.
Prior to that, I smoked a lot of cigarettes.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes, and really, really liked cigarettes. Three packs a day, for a while there.
I knew, of course, as just about everybody these days knows, that smoking cigarettes was a bad idea, and so I wanted to quit. Knew that I should quit. Tried to quit. Over and over again. In an effort to quit, I engaged in a number of programs, all of which failed miserably.
I chewed the gum. Nicorette. I chewed an awful lot of that gum over a period of about four months. When I think back on it, I can still taste it... this tart, sort of piercing flavor that would just sort of almost numb my mouth, throw chills up and down my spine as the lovely, lovely nicotine hit. The gum was expensive, almost as expensive (from what I remember) as cigarettes. And it wasn't nearly as cool. I mean, you couldn't lean against the bar looking all pensive and serious and make some witty, jaded philosophical point while smacking on a piece of Nicorette the way you could with a cigarette. And before too long I learned that chewing on two pieces of Nicorette while chain smoking could make one feel light-headed and nauseous, so I quit the Nicorette for my own health.
And I tried the Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant, has a side-effect which prevents the body from "processing" nicotine. You can smoke and smoke and smoke, but you won't get that "fix," that good, good feeling. The idea is that if you're getting nothing out of it, you'll just stop smoking. That didn't work for me. Not being able to process the nicotine just made me sort of angry, made me try harder. I smoked more and more and more, hoping that just one more cigarette and I'd break through that barrier. Add to that the fact that a second side-effect of the drug, for some, is the sensation of bugs crawling under the skin, this just absolutely awful sub dermal itchiness that cannot possibly be scratched. No fun at all. So I quit the Wellbutrin.
I tried hanging a picture of a diseased lung on my refrigerator door for a while. That depressed me every time I got thirsty and went to the fridge. When I got depressed, I usually sat on the porch and smoked.
I bought a carton of cheap, generic cigarettes. Not so much to save money, but because I generally smoked quality cigarettes, and thought that cheap, generic cigarettes were disgusting. I figured I would smoke fewer cigarettes this way, and might start winding down to none at all. I ended up hating them so much that I smoked them as fast as possible so that I could get through the whole carton and buy something good again. The carton disappeared in no time at all.
And of course I went through that "not buying" phase, where you don't buy your own pack, you just bum them here and there when you really need them. But I had a lot of generous friends, and even more not-so-terribly-bright friends who always left their packs lying around when I was over and made occasional comments like "man, I've been smoking an awful lot lately, I think I'm going through two packs a day and I don't even know how."
Somebody-- my sister, maybe?-- bought me a pack of those fake foam cigarettes. They come in a regular pack, look real, but there's no tobacco in them, just styrofoam or something all the way through. You're supposed to suck on them like you're really smoking, you can have them between your fingers, if you puff you get a little blast of menthol (I never smoked menthols, but you need to get something when you puff these things). They were kind of lame, but I tried. I was delivering pizza one night and I'd been alternating on runs between smoking a cigarette and puffing on one of these things. And then, in the dark, I reached down to the pack, thought I was grabbing a real cigarette, lit my lighter, inhaled, and nearly veered off the road, sucking in burning, mentholated styrofoam. Absolutely horrible. The pack of fakes went in the garbage as soon as I returned to the store.
The most successful program was the "sheer force of will" program. I was living with my on-again/off-again girlfriend at that time, and she really wanted me to quit, and my family really wanted me to quit, and I couldn't smoke in the apartment anyway, and it was expensive, and I wasn't hanging out in bars as much so there wasn't quite as much temptation, so I figured what the hell. I locked myself in a room for the weekend, away from anyone I could scream at, and fought it out. Resisted the urge. The first couple of weeks were hard, but after that, it wasn't so bad. I went a full six months without a single smoke, and felt pretty good about that. There were times when I wanted one. I mean, those were stressful times. Living with someone who I was pretty sure didn't actually like me very much, the band that I thought was going to be really, really huge had broken up before we'd even made our first record, I was adjusting to having a grown up job with normal morning hours, I was gaining weight. But I did it. Six months. And then I discovered that my lady friend was the line connecting all eight points of a twisted love octagon and I sort of got a little upset. I packed her stuff in the middle of the night, called her younger sister to come pick me up, and burned through most of a pack of Marlboros in an hour in one of my favorite bars.
None of my "programs" for quitting worked. They didn't work because as much as I kinda, sorta mostly knew that I should quit, on a deeper level, I really didn't want to. I really, really liked smoking. I liked complaining about smoking, sure. I liked thinking that it was a waste of money, bad for my health, a terrible habit. But I also just liked sitting there with a cigarette between my fingers. When I was smoking, I liked it. When I wasn't smoking, I wanted one.
Until one day I didn't want one any more.
I didn't try to quit. I mean, yes, I still had in the back of my mind the notion that I was going to eventually quit. But I wasn't working at it, wasn't making any effort.
I was dating a new, nice lady (the one that I married), and I hadn't told her that I was a smoker. She'd been a straight-edge girl back in her college days, and though she wasn't quite that hardcore about things anymore, I figured she'd have a low opinion of smokers, so I didn't mention it to her. I went outside to clean my car, to make it smell all fresh and nice so she wouldn't ask me why I let my friends smoke in the car. I took a white rag and cleaned the cloth ceiling on the passenger side. It came back a little gray, a little grubby. I went around to the other side and cleaned the ceiling above the driver's seat. It came back thick, black, chalky.
"Hmmm," I thought.
I set everything down, then went on sat on the trunk of my car, looking out into the street. I lit a cigarette, smoked it slowly, and processed that. Lit another one, smoked it. Enjoyed it. Then I threw the remainder of the pack in my garbage. And that was that.
7 years, 2 months, 5 days. Temptations, occasionally, but not very significant ones.
Programs, in my experience, don't work. Not in the long run, anyway.
What we need is a new vision. A new set of wants. A new understanding of our reality.
The difficult thing, I guess, is that we can't always set the schedule for that sort of thing. We can be open to it, we can set the conditions that might allow it, but we can't make it happen. That can be frustrating. But, as far as I can tell, there's really no other way.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Faith Is A Perturbing Thing
The other day, while we were having lunch, my sister read me her favorite Soren Kierkegaard quote, which she was putting into her sermon for this Sunday. It goes like this:
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
I like that. I like it a lot.
It reminded me of my own favorite Kierkegaard quote. Or, rather, not a quote exactly, but a long passage, a few pages in an essay called "How to Derive True Benediction From Beholding Oneself in the Mirror of the World."
Part of that goes like this:
Think of a lover who has now received a letter from his beloved-- as precious as this letter is to the lover, just so precious to thee, I assume, is God's Word; in the way the lover reads this letter, just so, I assume dost thou read God's Word...
I assume then that this letter from the beloved was written in a language which the lover did not understand... He takes a dictionary and sits down to spell out the letter, looking up every word so as to get at the translation...
Let us suppose that this letter from the lady-love not only contained, as such letters generally do, the declaration of an emotion, but that there was contained in it a desire, something which the beloved desired the lover to do. There was, let us suppose, a great deal required of him, a very great deal... he was off in a second to accomplish the desire of the beloved. Let us suppose that in the course of time the lovers met, and the lady said, 'But my dear, I didn't think of requiring that of thee; thou must have misunderstood the word or translated it wrong.' Dost thou believe that the lover now would regret that instead of hastening at once to fulfil the desire of his beloved he had not first entertained some misgivings, and then perhaps had obtained a few more dictionaries to help him out, and then had many misgivings, and then perhaps got the word rightly translated, and so was exempted from the task-- dost thou believe that he regrets this misapprehension? Dost thou believe that he is in less favor with the beloved?...
So the lover... understood how to read in such a way that, if there was a desire contained in the letter, one ought to begin at once to fulfil it, without wasting a second...
Think now of God's word... 'But,' thou perhaps wouldst say, 'there are so many obscure passages in the Holy Scriptures, whole books which are almost riddles.' To this I would reply: 'I see no need of considering this objection unless it comes from one whose life gives expression to the fact that he has punctually complied with all the passages which are easy to understand.' Is this the case with thee?
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
I like that. I like it a lot.
It reminded me of my own favorite Kierkegaard quote. Or, rather, not a quote exactly, but a long passage, a few pages in an essay called "How to Derive True Benediction From Beholding Oneself in the Mirror of the World."
Part of that goes like this:
Think of a lover who has now received a letter from his beloved-- as precious as this letter is to the lover, just so precious to thee, I assume, is God's Word; in the way the lover reads this letter, just so, I assume dost thou read God's Word...
I assume then that this letter from the beloved was written in a language which the lover did not understand... He takes a dictionary and sits down to spell out the letter, looking up every word so as to get at the translation...
Let us suppose that this letter from the lady-love not only contained, as such letters generally do, the declaration of an emotion, but that there was contained in it a desire, something which the beloved desired the lover to do. There was, let us suppose, a great deal required of him, a very great deal... he was off in a second to accomplish the desire of the beloved. Let us suppose that in the course of time the lovers met, and the lady said, 'But my dear, I didn't think of requiring that of thee; thou must have misunderstood the word or translated it wrong.' Dost thou believe that the lover now would regret that instead of hastening at once to fulfil the desire of his beloved he had not first entertained some misgivings, and then perhaps had obtained a few more dictionaries to help him out, and then had many misgivings, and then perhaps got the word rightly translated, and so was exempted from the task-- dost thou believe that he regrets this misapprehension? Dost thou believe that he is in less favor with the beloved?...
So the lover... understood how to read in such a way that, if there was a desire contained in the letter, one ought to begin at once to fulfil it, without wasting a second...
Think now of God's word... 'But,' thou perhaps wouldst say, 'there are so many obscure passages in the Holy Scriptures, whole books which are almost riddles.' To this I would reply: 'I see no need of considering this objection unless it comes from one whose life gives expression to the fact that he has punctually complied with all the passages which are easy to understand.' Is this the case with thee?
**************
The day after my conversation with my sister, I was reading Karen Armstrong's The Case For God, and came to a few pages on the meaning of the word "faith."
A major theme of Armstrong's book is that our modern, Western notion of "faith" is something very new. To many people, "faith" means "belief," in the sense of an assent to an idea. One believes that the earth is round, and that there are six chairs in the dining room, and that Christ died for the sins of the world. While the faith may spur action, it is the "belief," the "acceptance" of the idea, the intellectual assent, that counts as faith.
But, according to Armstrong, earlier generations of believers didn't see it that way, wouldn't have even grasped that concept. To earlier believers, intellectual assent to a set of "facts," believing in a certain set of details, had little or nothing to do with faith.
Armstrong follows the language of faith through the Greek and the Latin into modern English.
"Pistis," she explains, the word that now appears as "faith" in our New Testaments, meant "trust, loyalty, engagement, and commitment." Those are words that imply relationship, and a certain disposition.
In Latin, "pistis" become "fides" as a noun, and "credo" as a verb.
"Fides," the noun, is best translated as "loyalty."
"Credo," the verb, is derived from "cor do," which can be translated as "I give my heart."
"Opinar," the Latin for "I hold an opinion," was specifically and deliberately never used in place of "pistis."
Later, in the King James, "credo" and "fides" became "believe" and "belief." But "belief" meant something a little different in the King James days. The word "bileven," from which it was derived, meant "to prize, to value, to hold dear." "Belief" meant "loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty."
"Belief," Armstrong claims, started to mean "intellectual assent" only in the late 17th century, and then primarily when used by scientists and philosophers. Theologians didn't start using the word that way in large numbers until a couple of hundred years later.
I find all of that very, very interesting. It allows me to see the New Testament in a very different way.
**************
So I've been thinking about Kierkegaard and Armstrong off and on throughout this week, during those rare moments of silence, and I've felt a little challenged by what they both have to say.
I don't know where I'm going with this, exactly. The words still have to kick around for a while, they still have to settle somewhere.
But what I'm thinking is this:
There's no salvation-- however you want to define that-- in holding an idea.
What matters is the action, the transformation, the "being," that spills up and out of that idea. What matters is how that idea becomes lived, becomes tangible. Intellectual assent-- no matter how beautiful the idea-- is nothing. What matters is the orientation of one's life, the way we live it day to day.
Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.
That's tough stuff.
As I've said before,
The land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there.
Really, really tough stuff.
Because it would be an awful lot easier to live here as I lived there, and still get that "salvation" bit thrown in.
So this is stuff that I've got to think on for a while. Not to find some mental trick to get out of it, but to let it really work it's way in, to let it take hold.
Kind of sucks, doesn't it?
Fascinating
A jutice of the peace in Louisiana is refusing to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples.
He hasn't been fired yet, even though the couple whose refusal made headlines isn't the first he denied (there were four others).
And, of course, this isn't about racism.
This particular justice is not a racist. Not at all.
If you read the article closely, you'll see that the justice has some really good reasons for denying marriage licenses to interracial couples that aren't racist at all.
He isn't a racist.
No one ever is.
No one ever thinks that they're a bad person.
Of course, this is one guy. Louisiana Republicans are calling for the guy to step down, and I'm sure most of the outrage and shock is sincere, so this isn't exactly about the South and it isn't really about Republicans. It's one guy, with more power than he deserves, and really, really sad ideas. The couple will still get married. They shouldn't have had to deal with this, but they'll still get married.
But isolated as it may be (and less isolated than I think many people would like to believe it to be), this still just sort of blows the mind.
He hasn't been fired yet, even though the couple whose refusal made headlines isn't the first he denied (there were four others).
And, of course, this isn't about racism.
This particular justice is not a racist. Not at all.
If you read the article closely, you'll see that the justice has some really good reasons for denying marriage licenses to interracial couples that aren't racist at all.
He isn't a racist.
No one ever is.
No one ever thinks that they're a bad person.
Of course, this is one guy. Louisiana Republicans are calling for the guy to step down, and I'm sure most of the outrage and shock is sincere, so this isn't exactly about the South and it isn't really about Republicans. It's one guy, with more power than he deserves, and really, really sad ideas. The couple will still get married. They shouldn't have had to deal with this, but they'll still get married.
But isolated as it may be (and less isolated than I think many people would like to believe it to be), this still just sort of blows the mind.
Sugar Tongue
I've had this song in my head a lot lately, so I figured I'd find a live version and post it. The song is off the newest Indigo Girls album, "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug."
If you're considering picking up that disc, do. But be sure to pick up the double disc. The double CD set features a second recording of all the songs, stripped down to just acoustic instruments, no band. It is much, much better than the first disc, which, really is sort of indistinguishable from the last few albums they've put out (all of which are good, it's just not anything new).
That acoustic disc, though, is terrific.
Drinking tea with milk and Janjaweed
Pontificate on genocide and greed
A spoonful of dissent for an orchestra of need
Is just enough to please this colony
I like that. I like that a lot.
If you're considering picking up that disc, do. But be sure to pick up the double disc. The double CD set features a second recording of all the songs, stripped down to just acoustic instruments, no band. It is much, much better than the first disc, which, really is sort of indistinguishable from the last few albums they've put out (all of which are good, it's just not anything new).
That acoustic disc, though, is terrific.
Drinking tea with milk and Janjaweed
Pontificate on genocide and greed
A spoonful of dissent for an orchestra of need
Is just enough to please this colony
I like that. I like that a lot.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Dinner And A Movie
This Sunday, October 18, at 7 pm, the NEA will be showing the documentary "What A Way To Go." Probably not the whole thing. Big excerpts. There will be discussion that follows, and we've got to keep it all in that 2 to 2 1/2 hour time frame. This is something that I've been wanting to see, and I'm hoping it will be as good as the things I've heard about it.
Preceding the documentary, of course, will be a potluck at 6 pm. Local and vegetarian food is encouraged. If it's one or the other, the emphasis falls heavier on the vegetarian part.
If you're in the Syracuse area and dying to take part, let me know...
Preceding the documentary, of course, will be a potluck at 6 pm. Local and vegetarian food is encouraged. If it's one or the other, the emphasis falls heavier on the vegetarian part.
If you're in the Syracuse area and dying to take part, let me know...
Junkies And Juicers
It sometimes occurs to me that I have a weird kid. I mean, usually he doesn't seem weird to me. He seems perfectly normal. But then I think that maybe that in itself makes him kind of weird.
He says lots of weird things.
Like last night.
Last night my son said, over and over and over again, very loudly, and for no particular reason, while he was playing with toys and with a quirky smile on his face, "junkies and juicers."
Like this:
"Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers!"
It struck both my wife and I that this was an unusual thing for our cute little two year old to say, until we remembered this line from Neil Diamond's "The Good Lord Loves You:"
This song goes to the men in your prisons and jails
To the junkies and juicers and every good man that's failed
Neil Diamond's September Morn is one of Sam's very favorite albums, and so of course he'd see the need to shout "junkies and juicers" throughout the evening. The good lord loves them, you know.
The other day, Sam and I were both in the kitchen when he turned to me and said, with that same little smile, "God is too big for just one religion."
I'm really hoping he brings that up at day care, or in the grocery store with a stranger. It makes his sound smart and deep.
It'd be coolest if he mentioned it to a stranger who never heard the Spearhead song from which that line was lifted.
Spearhead is Sam's very, very favorite band. Because of Spearhead, Sam often lets me know that "revolution don't come with a warning, revolution don't send you an omen" and invites me to "yell fire."
When I picked Sam up from my mother's house the other day, she said that he kept repeating some line that she couldn't understand, as if he was speaking some other language. It turns out that he was just sort of talking very fast, and slurring his words a little. Once I realized that he was singing some more Spearhead, his words were crystal clear:
From the banks of the river
To the banks of the greedy
All of the riches
Taken back by the needy
We come from the country
And we come from the city
You can play us on a record
You can play us on a CD
I'm not sure what it was that my mother didn't understand. It's just "Yell Fire." She should have known from the "oh-ee-oh-ee-ay-oh" refrain.
The kid really likes music, and he hears more than I sometimes realize he hears. He knows the Indigo Girls from The Beatles from Spearhead from Bruce Springsteen from Neil Diamond, and he hears the lines, repeats them back. When he was born, my wife and I knew we'd have to edit our musical choices in front of him a little, would have to avoid songs laced with profanity. It hadn't occured to us that we'd have to keep an eye on them for philosophical or political content that he's not quite ready for.
Or creepy stuff with catchy melodies. Hearing him sing the Violent Femmes refrain "I hear the rain, I hear the rain, gotta kill the pain," or realizing that he has most of the lyrics to "Never Tell" ("don't you know... you never tell on someone... sink down to the bottom of the river") is a little chilling. But he sings it all with a smile, and seems to think it's just about rainy days, so it's not so bad.
Like I said, the kid loves music.
I pulled out my guitar before I had to head out to an NEA meeting tonight, and I started playing "Erie Canal." He started shouting along, and worked himself into a pretty frenzied dance. When we got into "Froggie Went a-Courtin'," he was starting to slow down a bit, but my wife managed to get out the video camera and catch a good 41 seconds of action before he saw her and demanded to be shown "Sam in the picture."
Weird, weird kid.
He says lots of weird things.
Like last night.
Last night my son said, over and over and over again, very loudly, and for no particular reason, while he was playing with toys and with a quirky smile on his face, "junkies and juicers."
Like this:
"Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers!"
It struck both my wife and I that this was an unusual thing for our cute little two year old to say, until we remembered this line from Neil Diamond's "The Good Lord Loves You:"
This song goes to the men in your prisons and jails
To the junkies and juicers and every good man that's failed
Neil Diamond's September Morn is one of Sam's very favorite albums, and so of course he'd see the need to shout "junkies and juicers" throughout the evening. The good lord loves them, you know.
The other day, Sam and I were both in the kitchen when he turned to me and said, with that same little smile, "God is too big for just one religion."
I'm really hoping he brings that up at day care, or in the grocery store with a stranger. It makes his sound smart and deep.
It'd be coolest if he mentioned it to a stranger who never heard the Spearhead song from which that line was lifted.
Spearhead is Sam's very, very favorite band. Because of Spearhead, Sam often lets me know that "revolution don't come with a warning, revolution don't send you an omen" and invites me to "yell fire."
When I picked Sam up from my mother's house the other day, she said that he kept repeating some line that she couldn't understand, as if he was speaking some other language. It turns out that he was just sort of talking very fast, and slurring his words a little. Once I realized that he was singing some more Spearhead, his words were crystal clear:
From the banks of the river
To the banks of the greedy
All of the riches
Taken back by the needy
We come from the country
And we come from the city
You can play us on a record
You can play us on a CD
I'm not sure what it was that my mother didn't understand. It's just "Yell Fire." She should have known from the "oh-ee-oh-ee-ay-oh" refrain.
The kid really likes music, and he hears more than I sometimes realize he hears. He knows the Indigo Girls from The Beatles from Spearhead from Bruce Springsteen from Neil Diamond, and he hears the lines, repeats them back. When he was born, my wife and I knew we'd have to edit our musical choices in front of him a little, would have to avoid songs laced with profanity. It hadn't occured to us that we'd have to keep an eye on them for philosophical or political content that he's not quite ready for.
Or creepy stuff with catchy melodies. Hearing him sing the Violent Femmes refrain "I hear the rain, I hear the rain, gotta kill the pain," or realizing that he has most of the lyrics to "Never Tell" ("don't you know... you never tell on someone... sink down to the bottom of the river") is a little chilling. But he sings it all with a smile, and seems to think it's just about rainy days, so it's not so bad.
Like I said, the kid loves music.
I pulled out my guitar before I had to head out to an NEA meeting tonight, and I started playing "Erie Canal." He started shouting along, and worked himself into a pretty frenzied dance. When we got into "Froggie Went a-Courtin'," he was starting to slow down a bit, but my wife managed to get out the video camera and catch a good 41 seconds of action before he saw her and demanded to be shown "Sam in the picture."
Weird, weird kid.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Even Glenn
I've had a thought on my mind now and again over the past few weeks-- a thought I had a little more opportunity to take out and examine during my two days of "quiet" last week, to sit with. I've had a thought on my mind now and again that goes something like this:
If me, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all in a room together, the others would all have something in common that they would not have in common with me.
They would all love Glenn Beck.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest even for a second that they would be Glenn Beck "fans." I take it as a given that they would find Glenn's ideas troubling. Wrong-headed. Offensive, disappointing.
But they would love Glenn Beck. They would love him, I think, not "because of" or "in spite of," but they would simply love him.
I can't say that.
Me, I can't say that I love Glenn Beck.
And we don't have to just pick on Glenn here. There's a whole host of people that you could put in his place. You could talk about the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world, the various pundits and politicians that have had me riled up so often on this site; the tweaked out sick sons of bitches whose depravity generates headlines daily, in this country and around the world; or the people closer to me, who don't make headlines, but whose names, whose voices, stir the same reaction as a Palin or a Beck or a Limbaugh.
Jesus, Gandhi, King. They'd love those people.
Me, when I hear them talk, when I run into them by some unhappy chance encounter, when for whatever reason my mind is drawn their way, when that vein in my neck starts bulging, when the language I use gets coarser and uglier, when my heart beats just a little bit faster, when I start to taste bile and feel like I could spit venom... what I'm feeling isn't love.
And I think that that's too bad for me. I think that I'm missing something here.
I've talked a lot, over the past few years, about the whole "vision, not programs" concept.
That concept-- a centerpiece of Daniel Quinn's writing, but also a concept shared by the New Environment Association and like-minded groups-- is essentially this: if we want society to change, to get "better," what we need is not new programs, but a new vision, a new way of thinking. Programs developed out of the old vision will only ever "tweak" the system, will only ever by minor adjustments, temporary fixes. Programs developed out of the old vision will take the same things for granted, will instinctively serve the same ends. With new vision, however, actions will flow, whether we mean them to or not. When we look at the world in a different way, we will not be able to help acting in a different way. Our values, our understanding, will be changed, and we cannot expect that this won't play out in our lives.
So... if you want people to "go green," then what you need is to have people come around to a new, "green" vision. Embracing old ideals and trying to put a green spin on them simply will not work. Really "going green" will require new values, new concepts, not more recycling programs, hybrid SUVs, and organic frozen entrees.
It is, basically, the whole "Leaving Egypt" notion that I've so often ranted about on this site.
This is what society needs. Not programs. Vision. Not things to do, but rather a new concept of who to be.
And this isn't just what we need collectively.
"Vision not programs" is an individual thing, too.
I've thought that for a long time, and I've tried to build on that, live as if I really, truly believed that. I often focus too much on the externals, have tried to change my own life, make it somehow "better," but adding to the to-do list, or maybe to the don't-do list. From working on the organic farm and preserving my veggies, to selling off or giving away possessions, to canceling cable and getting a library card, I've often found myself trying to simplify or live "sustainably" by embracing externals. I've reminded myself, when I've caught myself doing this, that the externals are all well and good, but that the most important thing is to understand it all differently, to approach it from a different place.
I've done alright with that, but I've missed some of the big stuff.
There are other ways of putting it. That's my favorite, though.
As much as I've always loved that passage, I haven't ever really seen fit to make that a part of my life, to live that out.
Not that I haven't been mostly all about "love."
My sister has a shirt that I like. It says "love thy neighbor," and then it goes on to break it down, to remind people who their neighbor is, to remind people who they're supposed to be loving... thy homeless neighbor, thy black neighbor, thy gay neighbor, thy Muslim neighbor, and so on.
I like that shirt.
I think that I mostly like that shirt because I've never had any problem at all loving those people. I can read it, smile, and hold some sort of moral high ground. I can feel more loving than my hateful fundamentalist adversaries. Hell, I don't just "love" these people in some abstract way, most of the time, given the opportunity to actually know them, I like these people.
Loving the disadvantaged, or the oppressed, or the victims, or the powerless has always just seemed natural. It's not difficult at all.
The advantaged, the oppressors, the victimizers, and the powerless have always been another story.
I don't love them.
If me, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all in a room together, the others would all have something in common that they would not have in common with me.
They would all love Glenn Beck.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest even for a second that they would be Glenn Beck "fans." I take it as a given that they would find Glenn's ideas troubling. Wrong-headed. Offensive, disappointing.
But they would love Glenn Beck. They would love him, I think, not "because of" or "in spite of," but they would simply love him.
I can't say that.
Me, I can't say that I love Glenn Beck.
And we don't have to just pick on Glenn here. There's a whole host of people that you could put in his place. You could talk about the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world, the various pundits and politicians that have had me riled up so often on this site; the tweaked out sick sons of bitches whose depravity generates headlines daily, in this country and around the world; or the people closer to me, who don't make headlines, but whose names, whose voices, stir the same reaction as a Palin or a Beck or a Limbaugh.
Jesus, Gandhi, King. They'd love those people.
Me, when I hear them talk, when I run into them by some unhappy chance encounter, when for whatever reason my mind is drawn their way, when that vein in my neck starts bulging, when the language I use gets coarser and uglier, when my heart beats just a little bit faster, when I start to taste bile and feel like I could spit venom... what I'm feeling isn't love.
And I think that that's too bad for me. I think that I'm missing something here.
********************
I've talked a lot, over the past few years, about the whole "vision, not programs" concept.
That concept-- a centerpiece of Daniel Quinn's writing, but also a concept shared by the New Environment Association and like-minded groups-- is essentially this: if we want society to change, to get "better," what we need is not new programs, but a new vision, a new way of thinking. Programs developed out of the old vision will only ever "tweak" the system, will only ever by minor adjustments, temporary fixes. Programs developed out of the old vision will take the same things for granted, will instinctively serve the same ends. With new vision, however, actions will flow, whether we mean them to or not. When we look at the world in a different way, we will not be able to help acting in a different way. Our values, our understanding, will be changed, and we cannot expect that this won't play out in our lives.
So... if you want people to "go green," then what you need is to have people come around to a new, "green" vision. Embracing old ideals and trying to put a green spin on them simply will not work. Really "going green" will require new values, new concepts, not more recycling programs, hybrid SUVs, and organic frozen entrees.
It is, basically, the whole "Leaving Egypt" notion that I've so often ranted about on this site.
This is what society needs. Not programs. Vision. Not things to do, but rather a new concept of who to be.
And this isn't just what we need collectively.
"Vision not programs" is an individual thing, too.
I've thought that for a long time, and I've tried to build on that, live as if I really, truly believed that. I often focus too much on the externals, have tried to change my own life, make it somehow "better," but adding to the to-do list, or maybe to the don't-do list. From working on the organic farm and preserving my veggies, to selling off or giving away possessions, to canceling cable and getting a library card, I've often found myself trying to simplify or live "sustainably" by embracing externals. I've reminded myself, when I've caught myself doing this, that the externals are all well and good, but that the most important thing is to understand it all differently, to approach it from a different place.
I've done alright with that, but I've missed some of the big stuff.
*********************
Here's a radically different vision, the kind of vision that can change an individual life, the kind of vision that can change us collectively. Here's a very different way of being, one that we all nod along to, but that very few of us actually embrace. One that I've promoted, but have never actually, truly, really allowed to shape my life.
It goes like this:
I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself... and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you...
There are other ways of putting it. That's my favorite, though.
As much as I've always loved that passage, I haven't ever really seen fit to make that a part of my life, to live that out.
Not that I haven't been mostly all about "love."
My sister has a shirt that I like. It says "love thy neighbor," and then it goes on to break it down, to remind people who their neighbor is, to remind people who they're supposed to be loving... thy homeless neighbor, thy black neighbor, thy gay neighbor, thy Muslim neighbor, and so on.
I like that shirt.
I think that I mostly like that shirt because I've never had any problem at all loving those people. I can read it, smile, and hold some sort of moral high ground. I can feel more loving than my hateful fundamentalist adversaries. Hell, I don't just "love" these people in some abstract way, most of the time, given the opportunity to actually know them, I like these people.
Loving the disadvantaged, or the oppressed, or the victims, or the powerless has always just seemed natural. It's not difficult at all.
The advantaged, the oppressors, the victimizers, and the powerless have always been another story.
I don't love them.
****************
Thich Nhat Hanh, in Being Peace and No Death, No Fear and other books, tells the story of a girl and a pirate.
It's part of his discussion of "interbeing," the concept that we are all connected, that in some real way we are all part of one another, of everything that is around us.
He writes about his experiences working with boat people in Southeast Asia. He describes the brutal pirate industry that grew up on the waters to prey on the boat people as they fled their homes, to take away from them what little they'd managed to salvage from their former lives.
And then he tells the story of the young girl who was attacked and brutally raped by a pirate, and who then threw herself into the ocean to drown.
Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to realize that in a real sense, we are that girl. As I have put it myself in other places, "not there but for the grace of God, but there go I." We are her. Her suffering is our suffering.
Understanding that is a step toward real love, toward real compassion. Embracing the suffering of that young girl can be painful, but powerful.
But Thich Nhat Hanh doesn't stop there. He reminds us that if in some real way we are that girl, then we are also the pirate. We are not only the victim, but we are the victimizer.
In Being Peace, he follows it with a poem, part of which goes like this:
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I've been okay with being, on some level, that girl, or that Ugandan child. Loving them is easy.
I've never been okay with being, on some level, that weapons dealer, that pirate. Loving them hasn't even been an option on the table, hasn't been a consideration.
There are those that it would take heroic amounts of forgiveness to love. Impossible amounts.
The truth is that sometimes, that much forgiveness feels sort of like dying. It's ugly and it hurts.
But here's the thing... if I think that Jesus and Gandhi and King and Thich Nhat Hanh and others have all been on to something, and if what they were on to seems to have been at least in part "love them all, always," then maybe it's time to love them all, always. Even Glenn. To not do that, to expect to find that certain kind of peace and strength and goodness that they've all found without taking seriously what they've had to say about getting there, will only keep me running in the same (angry) circles forever and ever and ever.
And so I've decided-- as much as this really sort of sucks, as much as my gut is resisting it, as much as the mere notion makes me tense up and grind my teeth-- that I'm done with the hating. I've decided-- and I know, this sounds lame-- that I'm going to love people. All of them. Not because of or in spite of, but just love them.
I have no illusions that this will be easy. I think it is going to take a lot of hard work, and that I will not be good at it for a long, long time. But lots of good things aren't easy. We have to do them anyway.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Quiet
Until this week, I'd never visited Farm Sanctuary in the off-season. I'd been up a few times for Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving is sort of a one day "on-season" in the midst of the off-season, isn't really what I mean. In my what have now become many visits, I'd walked onto the farm only in the summer, or on that holiday, with small crowds of people, sunshine, a certain low-key and very relaxing bustle. Nights spent in the cabin have always involved my wife (and in the past two years, our son), wide open sky, a bottle of wine, stars, long talks.
When I got there this week, it was, from the moment I got out of my car, different.
It's the off-season.
The gift shop was closed, that low-key bustle was no bustle at all, no faces, no voices. It was early afternoon, but the sky was already dark, the rain came off and on, not too much at once, but just this thin drizzle now and then. The wind, which had been severe down in the town, on the thruway getting there, was that much more fierce up there in the hills, cut into me, shook everything. I found someone who found the key to my cabin, checked in alone, and unpacked my things, listening to wind shake the door and whistle through cracks, listening to the howling, the occasional patter of rain on the roof, hoping that the little heater in the wall would be able to keep the cabin comfortably warm overnight.
I was happy. This wasn't what I'd pictured, but it was exactly what I'd come for. I took the small pile of notebooks and the one thick book I'd brought (Karen Armstrong's The Case For God) and set them on the nighstand, thinking-- happily, perhaps melodramatically-- back on some passages from my very favorite Thomas Merton book:
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I cam here from the monastery last night... The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a think it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself...
After a short nap-- listening to the wind shaking the place, I was just sort of lulled to sleep, I couldn't help it-- and an hour or so of reading, I drove into town for a bit. Had dinner in a decent Chinese restaurant with a good vegetarian menu. I had thought I might catch a movie, but the theatre was closed for the night. Thought I might spend a little time in a bookstore/cafe that I'd driven by a dozen times before, but discovered that that place was closed for good.
So it was back to the cabin, back to the quiet, back to the thoughts I'd been putting off and hiding from for so many weeks and month, back to the reasons I'd decided to drive out there alone, to the piles of empty pages that I hoped to fill, the book I hoped to take something from, the cushions and mats that I hoped would keep me sitting still long enough to hear my own breathing, to discover a little stillness within.
I spent a lot of hours in the quiet.
In the morning, I got up early, had my breakfast, spent some time scratching cows and goats behind the ears, laughed when a dominant goat chased the others off so that he alone could enjoy the apparent ecstasy of a good scratching, then headed down into town where I walked up and down the gorge trail (feeling out of shape on those last few steep stairs, the longest three miles I've done in a long time).
And then I came back home. Where it is happy, where it is good, but where it is not quiet. Not quiet at all. Where I will have to work hard to put into practice the insights that I had while briefly able to listen to the wind and to the rain and to the sound of my own breathing.
When I got there this week, it was, from the moment I got out of my car, different.
It's the off-season.
The gift shop was closed, that low-key bustle was no bustle at all, no faces, no voices. It was early afternoon, but the sky was already dark, the rain came off and on, not too much at once, but just this thin drizzle now and then. The wind, which had been severe down in the town, on the thruway getting there, was that much more fierce up there in the hills, cut into me, shook everything. I found someone who found the key to my cabin, checked in alone, and unpacked my things, listening to wind shake the door and whistle through cracks, listening to the howling, the occasional patter of rain on the roof, hoping that the little heater in the wall would be able to keep the cabin comfortably warm overnight.
I was happy. This wasn't what I'd pictured, but it was exactly what I'd come for. I took the small pile of notebooks and the one thick book I'd brought (Karen Armstrong's The Case For God) and set them on the nighstand, thinking-- happily, perhaps melodramatically-- back on some passages from my very favorite Thomas Merton book:
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I cam here from the monastery last night... The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a think it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself...
After a short nap-- listening to the wind shaking the place, I was just sort of lulled to sleep, I couldn't help it-- and an hour or so of reading, I drove into town for a bit. Had dinner in a decent Chinese restaurant with a good vegetarian menu. I had thought I might catch a movie, but the theatre was closed for the night. Thought I might spend a little time in a bookstore/cafe that I'd driven by a dozen times before, but discovered that that place was closed for good.
So it was back to the cabin, back to the quiet, back to the thoughts I'd been putting off and hiding from for so many weeks and month, back to the reasons I'd decided to drive out there alone, to the piles of empty pages that I hoped to fill, the book I hoped to take something from, the cushions and mats that I hoped would keep me sitting still long enough to hear my own breathing, to discover a little stillness within.
I spent a lot of hours in the quiet.
In the morning, I got up early, had my breakfast, spent some time scratching cows and goats behind the ears, laughed when a dominant goat chased the others off so that he alone could enjoy the apparent ecstasy of a good scratching, then headed down into town where I walked up and down the gorge trail (feeling out of shape on those last few steep stairs, the longest three miles I've done in a long time).
And then I came back home. Where it is happy, where it is good, but where it is not quiet. Not quiet at all. Where I will have to work hard to put into practice the insights that I had while briefly able to listen to the wind and to the rain and to the sound of my own breathing.
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