Subversive Shorts!

None of us can know our own personal deficits. They are blind spots; lacunae, to borrow the title from a recent Barbara Kingsolver novel I admired. (I'm now savoring her nonfictional take on living close to the land, reading it slowly in imitation of the manner of eating which will provide the best reward, local and global, as she celebrates.)

We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!

There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.

Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.

The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a  post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.

How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.

There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.

The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.

Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.

Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.

It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.

Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?

I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.

I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.

I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.

But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.

De-contextualizing on Oscar Sunday

I know Oscar about as well as I know Superbowl. But I was alerted by the popcorn man when, the night before, I watched A Single Man, film version, with some friends at a miraculously preserved massive old cinema here in Buffalo. It's the same theater where my father remembers going for the double feature for ten cents on a Saturday or Sunday matinee.

Those who work at this place are true film lovers, and so the Oscars are significant to them. Enter the ancient doors and there is a genuine old-fashioned ticket booth (you might want to picture something descended from a London phone booth, and only slightly larger - perhaps like those booths from which they sell tickets at carnivals, but more ornate). Inside is a fairly old man - well, older than me - who I believe has been taking tickets for as long as I've been buying them. He smiles and seems genuinely glad to see you, inviting you to go ahead in and look around for your friends if you want. I said, no I'd just go ahead and buy my ticket.

This is one of those times when I might wish I could deploy a movie camera instead of just words. Picture me now before the movie - if each of us can pull it off - driving out of Buffalo to our spiritually grounded exurb to the south, East Aurora. East Aurora is the onetime home of Elbert Hubbard, the Roycrofter, and is and has been a significant one among a local spread of spiritual hubs. Around here the Mormons got their start, as did the patron saints of spiritualism more generally. The Fox sisters (yeah, I never heard of them either) grew up here. This is Iroquois land, long since desecrated by the white man.

I am an interloper also to this spiritualist gathering, organized (well, sprung like an impromptu party, in fact) in honor of a man - a true adept - who would later let our host know that he'd turned back home when he learned that there would be a party in his honor. He is that shy. My own entrance was announced in such a way that I was afraid I might be called on to make some sort of speech: "Chinese scholar, former headmaster, brilliant man" if I'm not mistaken. I didn't even blush, so absurd was it.

This was as nice a party as I've ever attended, populated by the likes of those on the inside of that Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in case you have that cinematic image ready to hand. I learned about Tarot, astrology, alchemy, qi-gong (with which I am acquainted in rather academic fashion - that far from practice), Native American spirituality, and a whole lot more. I wished I had a chance to learn about dousing, although now that I'm back in the city I don't think I'll need it.

I am very much an outsider to this sort of understanding, and therefore was by far the most ignorant of the bunch. To a person, these people are almost incredibly diligent in their studies. I can't imagine a single one of them fitting any billing as "charlatan" (just in case you're in the market for a reading).

There was one moment when the party was paused by our host, who'd been drinking - to be highly politically incorrect about it - like an Indian (which I could only be jealous about, having recently been ordered away from the sauce), announced that his recently proposed book about Native American spirituality had won a contract. Two, in fact, which must be the dream of any author - to have two houses competing for one's work. Applause and congratulations!

Then he told a funny story about how white people like to act as gatekeepers to the arcana of those whose tribes they bond with. Which must be about as funny from the inside as it is from the outside. I don't think Mason was intending to speak for the tradition. He would write, rather, about the tradition. Which, as a bona fide teacher of and about Chinese, I do actually know can sometimes be accomplished better as a non-native; a member of the target audience with whom the bond is more important at the outset. Sometimes those foreign to English have been its most accomplished stylists.

The pause in the party to make space for that announcement extended to that singular moment when the party is all one. The little clusters of animated conversation had stopped, and the topic turned to Buffalo. As in "what is it about the pall which hangs over our city?" The grey which almost always greets you driving or flying in. The certainty among our citizens that things will always be as they have been and that change is impossible. That we deserve our fate and can only learn to like it (which we typically succeed in doing).

Now here's the part where I would love it if you could be watching on film. Spontaneously around the circle there were offerings of astrological reads of the city ('very Taurian, and therefore stubborn and caught up in itself'), remembrances of some sort of grudge about a running race between the Iroquois and the white man, where the white man cheated. Desecration more generally of this sacred ground.

I felt my mouth opening to offer up my own prognostications of hope.  But of course I realized discretion as the better part of valor. I was out-gunned here in all ways of knowing; the literary, the local and cultural history, the current politics. I'm only recently back in town and so what do I know? Plus, I've never been diligent in anything. I was certainly out-gunned in the occult ways of knowing.

As you know, faithful reader (I guess I'm speaking to myself again now, although even I don't have a good read on what I've written. Maybe especially I), I've had trouble lately with pulmonary embolisms, whose symptoms seem to keep me on my toes by coming back. As I often say, just like "I'm driving a Toyota" now in relation to my own body.

Well, even I know that just as Adam and Eve are a convenient fiction about what must be intertwined in each of us, and just as Jesus was distorted if not destroyed by a patriarchal power-elite which still owns His Church, there is no sense to believing or acting as though your body can be distinguished from your mind. Well, except for this Native American medicine man who recommends treating your body as your pet if you want to get healthy. Which seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time.

Mostly, though, these folks stay clear of terms like soul and divinity. And for my part, I'm not exactly despairing that the enshrined and fully institutionalized and almost ungodly expensive Western medical establishment has no certain answers for me. After all, that would mean that something about me was definitively broken, even if they were able to offer some sort of fix for it. Some extravagantly expensive fix, just as the rule-out testing has been - extravagantly expensive.

The nice thing about no certain diagnosis is that perhaps there really is something you can and might and even should do about it yourself. I might just follow up on some leads for Shiatsu massage, or qi-gong internal alchemical exercises. Although they have yet to be theoretically validated by Western science, there is a growing body of evidence that these things "work" even in the absence of theory. Even government institutions now sanction their practice.

And for sure, within the theoretical frames as were presented or represented to me that night, my symtoms find a fit and therefore a reason for hope. Neither the diagnosis nor the treatment require much reaching in any of these "alternative" traditions, where in my "native" tradition, they are at an almost complete loss without a slot to put me in.

Which pretty much just begs the question about Buffalo, don't you almost have to say? As in why are these folks sitting around and grousing about what's wrong with Buffalo the same as everyone else does, no matter what their frame of reference. Shouldn't they be doing something about it? Or would Buffalo as a whole need to be willing to sit for its reading???

We do that already in the "what if a whole community were to read the same book" department. Like everything else about this town, we probably have much higher rates of participation than is the norm. But I guess we're hardly all together about what we want. I guess Buffalo would have to change its mind as a whole, and what are the chances for that?

So, I retreated from the party to the more conventional fare of dinner and a movie. I'd missed the dinner part, but the movie is where I started in this post. I did need to stay clear of the attraction of drink at each of the three dinners I avoided that night - so popcorn was my fare. Mmmmmm. Real butter!!

And then there were the inevitable Oscars. I have rabbit ears (no, silly, my TV does), being still not ready to sign any contracts or leases but the ones for mobility. The one channel I can never pull in is the one showing the Oscars. Now I never watch the Oscars, but somehow not being able to made me feel terribly alone. I tried every conceivable antenna position, scanned on-line to confirm that in fact there was no feed, gave up for about the third time, and then finally, as if by some miracle, I hit upon the one magic Kundalini position in which I could sync with the ethereal feed.

Now I was chained to the show. I felt less alone, but so very distant from the accomplishment of this apparent horde of winners. I was glad for their work. Who doesn't love the movies? The humility sounded almost genuine to me, moved just a bit beyond the acting. Mostly, I was bored. I guess that was true of a lot of people.

The stars almost did look and act like normal people though. That has to be some kind of progress, right? Now here's the kicker: (I've been at this now for a length of time unusual for me, who bangs out a thought a day, just about) Yesterday, which is now Monday, I fulfilled my appointment with my Native-to-me Doc. I have a diagnosis! I have a fairly rare mutation among my genes which causes a drastically increased propensity for clotting.

Of course, that hardly "explains" why me, why here, why now; all of which questions have the one important answer that if not me and here and now I would most likely not be alive. Lucky, in other words, that I had family around and was near a hospital. The propensity simply explains the why me part as a chain of unlucky inheritance.

The funny thing is that the mutation, called the "Factor V (Leiden) mutation" descends from that city in Holland from where the Mayflower set sail, where there was a cluster of such clotters. I guess that proves my ancestry, in a way that's hardly comforting. It means more tests now, and a lifelong blood-thinning regimen which, while handling one set of risk factors, hands me another.

So, I guess I won't be letting go of the Western medicine trapeze just yet. They've found me a place and made me an adherent. Not that it might not also be useful to go for the Eastern frame at the same time, which might help to address the why here, why now part of the equation, which in the West is always left to random chance.

It doesn't feel like random chance to me. There have been too many recent changes in my life. I still hold out hope that I can go back to un-medicated and happy without having my life changed by the contaminating knowledge that asteroids may hit, earthquakes may let loose, clots may form, the accelerator may stick, and even the key is no longer a mechanical object. It is a code and impossible to enter while driving.

Many of you may think that we are in the midst of some kind of information explosion. That there is so much *more* we know now than we ever did before. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize the absurdity of that notion. Our brains have not changed one iota since we were formed as a species. To use that hackneyed and tired brain-as-computer metaphor, believing in some kind of explosion of information would be to believe that our brains have been consistently upgraded, according to some kind of biological Moore's law of geometric expansion, which they clearly haven't been.

But no, you will say, the "information," so-called, is what's "out there" all around us, cataloged in libraries and on the internet now, in papers and in teaching traditions, and simply not possible of containment within a single mind. What has changed has been our relationship to the information that's always been there. Our frames have been filled out, almost to the point of being "fleshed." We now know that we can, in principle, guide ourselves to some solid sense of reality, and that we will not be disappointed *except* by random incursions from what must remain, in principle, like a roll of dice, beyond our ability to know, to control, to predict.

A single mind is no more elaborate than it ever was, it is simply better aligned than it could have been with all other non-disformed minds. This is the magic of trans-cultural scientific understanding, grounded in the universal "language" of mathematics. It's what you *must* agree with, unless you're nuts, perverse, true religious or some other patently dysfunctional aberration from survivability.

This then, is that precisely wonderful moment in history, where you can only imagine what God has written for us, for he hasn't said a thing (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It must be wonderful, right? Just as quickly as Toyota can transform from being the trusted creator of trusty automobiles into the panderer of more complexity than even they can be on top of (give me back my mechanical linkage, gas pedal to carburetor; key to ignition; brake pedal to pads); so quickly does a person leave his body.

Not some "soul" which is the silliest idea since ideas were thought of (the silliest word since "information"), rather some utter absence of the ability, or the need, to look forward. The plots - largely fictional - that we must hatch for ourselves to bridge each moment to the next must surely end somewhere. After a certain age, you simply are no longer your best and brightest self. There is more looking back than forward, and then it stops. The interval grows infinite, in mirror-image mockery of what Newton's Calculus once resolved.

This fact is hardly cause for terror. There never was a "you" in the first place. We're all gerunds - activities - spanning the intervals between one instance and the next. It is only the forward and the backing; there is no *being*. That would be absurd.

And therefore there is no end to being. There was never any beginning. As it now and ever shall be, Amen.

The hope I hold out, for Buffalo, and for the world, is trivially simple to apprehend. It is that there will be some rather massive conspiracy. Some breathing together of words which simply and perhaps suddenly make sense to all and each of us. This is the catalyzing of the language which is now upon us. Not more information, not more truth exactly, unless by that you mean truing, one against the other. We all suddenly agree on the basics. The frames unite, and we become all one. As it was in the beginning (which never was).

OK, bye bye for now. This is getting a bit overheated. My little brain needs a break before it turns to crystal and shatters into a million shards.

News!

I must take a break now, from moving file cabinets up three flights. It's recycling day, and I had resolved to throw most of the files away. But I was stopped by these mountains of paper of my very own accomplishment. Letters written, students recommended, faculty evaluated. Chinese teaching materials, and other things I seem to keep thinking I'd be interested in some day.

Once before, already, I had emptied out these same file cabinets. There are only so many cycles a person can go through before there's nothing left to toss. And so I moved the first one, not even believing myself that it could be done alone. But so long as you take it only one step at a time, and work out the angles and the balance, it isn't necesssarily very much about muscle.

Still, the second one weighs a bit heavier on my mind. We all live this life of Sisyphus, condemned to push the rock back up the hill, knowing that it will come crashing down, and that we will have to start again.

Our condemnation is the foreknowledge, but the act is no more difficult than lots of things we do because we want to. In sport, in transport, in report and import-export. We're always moving and expending lots of effort. Even my U-haul boxes encourage me to mark the first the second the third the fourth time I will use them, so that they don't get wasted or recycled too early. As if I'm expected to be in some perpetual motion home to home. Save energy and cost, and keep your packing materials always ready to hand!

And it's not all bad, since were I to stay put I never would clean out various drawers and closets and cubbyholes and garages, quite evidently judging from the stuff I discovered after having forgotten about it completely and sometimes still couldn't quite discard. Rituals of renewal are or should be important. Wholesale cleanings out and paintings and refurbishments. And then the rock can start its uphill climb again, no different really from the downhill rush. It's all a matter of perspective.

We are at such at time with our country. Lots of people smarter than me wonder how to re-fund that fourth pillar of our democracy, the free press. Lots of people smarter than me actually do believe that the blogosphere will do it; that this empowering of thinking people to write whatever's on our minds, will keep our cappos honest in their deflowering of the earth.

Except that so much of the time, bloggers are just like someone in a crowd pointing up into the sky and gazing there. Lots of heads will turn. There may still be nothing there. No matter how many people are free to write, no one of them may have access.

Edited copy, with writers who have statutory access to the halls of power is essential to our republic, plain and simple. One whistlblower may be all it takes to bring down the corrupt and the dishonest. But plenty of times, there is no-one in the room to blow the whistle. Everyone there is in on the take, and that's by careful pre-arrangement.

The problem with the news has nothing to do with free copy on the Internet. The problem is that all the time we used to have to read the paper over breakfast or during our train-commutes has dissolved into paying rapt attention to the traffic jam we're stuck in. Breakfast is on the run, or in the car, and we must steal moments during breaks or in between work emails to get a sniff of the news from the company-provided Internet.

And what time we do have not at work, if we have any at all apart from our Blackberry tethers, we'd like to spend in family matters or self-indulgent entertainments.

We might spend a little time on Facebook, keeping up with friendly spam. Facebook is like our newspaper used to be. No need to read all the emails, just browse the headlines from those we're interested to keep up with; so much more efficient than to make epistolary rounds by phone or paper or electronic targeted thought. Which no one has time to read anyhow, if you take any time to write it.

Between Facebook and Google News our very Republic has been squeezed right out of existence, and we dare complain that Obama has let us down!!! This trouble has nothing to do with the medium. It has to do with how we organize our time, and what we do with our collective want. We want to drive. We want to spend that much of our disposable income on our wheels. We want there to be no choice about it, and we are desperately afraid that without that industry our economy really will melt down beyond the ability of government printing presses to bring it back.

No sane person wants to live in an economy run by bureaucrats. The bureaucratic structure embodies the Peter Principle, which means that those in power are always and only the ones who failed at risk taking. By definition, they are on the make or finished. These are not the folks you want to have decision making power over you. Anyone who's tried out banking in pre-capitalist China knows what I'm talking about.

But no sane person wants to live in an economy without bureaucratic controls on what the risk takers are allowed to do. And there really are ways to encourage creativity among the risk-averse classes. Just as there are ways for creativity to survive schooling. I'd guess it has something to do with the balance among standardized testing, performance review, and political correctness.

No sane person wants to trust those in power to wield it in our best interests. And the solution is to take some time that's not on the company nickel, over breakfast perhaps, or during a sane commute (perhaps you can do your exercising on a bicycle on the way to work, and take the time you would have spent at the gym??). Take some time to read the news. Peruse the headlines, and then look a little bit more deeply at the ones which peak your interest.

The web is no better or worse than paper for this. Sites like pikk.com, can help to replicate the newspaper's sense of location, and approximate the efficiency of scanning the open pages of an actual paper. Your renewed interest will guarantee the value of location and interest-specific advertising, and so those investigative reporters can be paid again.

But the automobile has got to go. There can be no negotiation on that one, or we're all screwed in every direction. It's not just the hot air, or the cost of the energy. It's our very survival as humanity which is at stake here. Driven, we are beastly.

And oh yeah, the news! My house will close before Christmas. The delay is all blamed on the unconscionable and constipated banking system. What are they doing with all that printed money, one might really like to know. They sure seem awfully careful all of the sudden to lend any of it back out. Well, Merry Christmas then, to one and all! Just a few days early. Though not soon enough for Santa's shopping. Well, there's always credit.

Sisyphus Rocks!!