Readings: Still Here by Ram Dass

The notes below were made during a second reading of the excellent book, Still Here, by Ram Dass. I was still working at Alden Library when I read the book for the first time. I had purchased it to see if it would help me to cope better with aging. It did.


But, after I retired on April 1, 2020, I found that I was again having problems dealing with feeling old and useless, so I decided to give the book a second read and this time take some notes for future reference. The results of that second reading and note-taking can be seen below:

Ram Dass Notes

·       Be conscious. Do not allow myself to be unconsciously influenced by cultural attitudes toward aging, e.g. seniors are: silly, stubborn, vindictive,  cute, invisible;

·       Don’t fight nature. Aging is not a type of failure.

·       Don’t unconsciously view yourself as “other” or as a burden to society and the young;

·       Stop processing information and strive instead for wisdom, which alone increases with age, up until death;

·       Rather than striving to stay up-to-date, see enlightenment through the wisdom of directed consciousness;

·       We are materialists – the real is perceived through the senses.

·       Consciousness + Matter + Energy = the Universe;

·       Life is a journey toward Awareness = Atman = God;

·       Old age as a release from materialism (body). Liberation, not loss. Ask: Is more really better? Is enough enough?;

·       Meaning of life seen through: jobs, possessions, health only = constant suffering, anxiety;

·       Reincarnation: learning to be a Buddha;

·       Awareness = Ground of Being = Atman;

·       You have the power to age as you choose: from ego’s fear of death to soul awareness;

·       Practice mindfulness: meditation: a) be comfortable; b) relax jaw, tongue touching front teeth; c) look down at 45 degree angle, forearms on thighs, concentrate on breathing through the nostrils;

·       Face Your Fears: Senility; loneliness; embarrassment; powerlessness; loss of role/meaning; depression;

·       Accept your aging body; don’t bemoan it;

·       Practice walking meditation – awareness of body’s motions;

·       Old age is being, not role playing; freedom to do nothing at all;

·       The Ego collects information the Soul needs to learn Wisdom;

·       The Ego is an actor that has forgotten it is playing a role;

·       Elders now suffer isolation, removal from family role;

·       The tendency to isolate is dangerous;

·       From a soul perspective, dependency can be liberating;

·       Do not allow loss of power to cause fear and suffering;

·       Stillness is required to awaken wisdom. No need for busyness;

·       Dharma is Karma;

·       Slow down and open the door to Mystery;

·       Anicca – the impermanence of all phenomena;

·       Observe change from the present moment: Awareness;

·       In the moment we are free of Ego’s desires and open to Soul;

·       Future: fear thrives on the unknown;

·       Time and change are interrelated: we measure each by the other;

·       Curiosity rather than dread;

·       There is no “way things ought to be” – only the way things are;

·       The desire to control change is the greatest obstacle to Wisdom;

·        Mystery is the Soul’s element;

·       Attention: Eternity is Now;

·       Attention is the transforming agent;

·       Death is the final stage of our healing;

·       Death is like taking off a tight shoe;

·       Don’t allow your death to be guided by Ego: be Aware;

·        Change is the mantra of aging;

·       Gita: use the battles of life to become God;

·       Greater suffering elicits higher consciousness;

·       Suffering is caused by attachment, so it prompts us to let go;

·       To let go is to heal – not to cure – what ails us;

·       Faith and Love (Soul Awareness) are stronger than aging and death.

Readings: Go Set a Watchman ~ Harper Lee

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I just finished reading Harper Lee's long-suppressed novel, Go Set a Watchman. I found it disturbing. I did not read the novel with the intention of writing about it; the mixed reviews, and the history of its road to publication (with the suggestion that a semi-senile Harper Lee was coerced into allowing it to be published under less than scrupulous circumstances) were off-putting enough that I had pretty much decided to take a pass on it. I don't now recall what changed my mind. It would be dishonest of me to say that there were not parts of it that I very much enjoyed. The novel had moments that brought a lump to my throat. It kept me reading, (although I found it slow to get moving) and I finished it rather quickly.

I suppose Go Set a Watchman would have seemed quite enlightened as the work of a Southern lady in the mid-1950s, when it was written. But having not been published at that time, it probably would have been better to leave it residing quietly, with the rest of Harper Lee's papers, in the archives of a library somewhere. It is a profoundly conservative work, in all the worst ways. Its ideas are paternalistic, segregationist, pro-states' rights in the Dixiecrat sense, and subtly, but unmistakably, racist.

Because I had no intention of writing about Watchman when I picked it up, I was not taking notes as I made my way through it. Its racist elements are for the most part, as I say above, subtle, and it would require quoting long passages with added explication to highlight the underlying bigotry. That said, the first truly cringe-worthy passage that I came across occurs on page 156. Jean Louise Finch (Scout), home on a visit to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City, has gone alone to the house of Calpurnia, the beloved black maid/nanny who helped raise Scout after the death of her mother. As Zeebo, a member of Calpurnia's family, leads Scout into her home, we get this:

"She followed him into a dark parlor to which clung the musky sweet smell of clean Negro, snuff, and Hearts of Love hairdressing." [emphasis added]

The "smell of clean Negro"...Really?

A less blatantly offensive, but still indicative, thing that popped out at me as I read further along, occurs in a flashback.  Here we accompany a nervous fourteen-year-old Scout Finch on her first big date, with Henry, the boy who is to become her presumptive spouse later in the plot::

"She was sensible enough to sit out jitterbug numbers and avoid music with a South American taint, and Henry said when she learned to talk and dance at the same time she'd be a hit." [emphasis added]

Why does something "South American" so immediately possess a "taint" rather than a "flavor" or a "complicated rhythm" or anything else non-pejorative? 

Now for all of you contemporary gals out there who refer frequently to your misogynometers, I will add that what it takes in this book to bring Jean Louise Finch back to her senses concerning all of the above, after having been corrupted by Northern liberals in evil New York City, is a hard backhand to the mouth, delivered by her loving Uncle Jack for all the "right" reasons. And this is the denouement of the novel's plot.

So I found this to be a flawed work; and only partially because it is anachronistic and was left that way by its contemporary editors. Much of the flaw clearly resided in Harper Lee herself. 

There is, however, one other passage of which I made note, and I will close this review by quoting it. The line is delivered by Scout's loving Uncle Jack--the man who popped her a good one in the paragraph above:

"Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends."

I like that. 
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Readings: The Panopticon

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The musings of Anais Hendricks, the wonderful teenage protagonist of Jenna Fagan’s great novel, The Panopticon:

They say the devil’s best trick was to make everyone believe he didnae exist. Maybe God’s just a scientist. This is all an experiment gone wrong, every single one of us, just wonky as fuck because of some chemical cock-up that was meant to produce something less faulty.

Yes. Quite possibly so.

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Readings: A Writer Satirizes Writers

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Very early this morning, as I was sipping my first cup of coffee, I was reading the final story in George Saunders’ fine collection, Pastoralia. The title of that story is “The Falls.”  The story’s protagonist is a sorry creature named Morse, who lives in a tiny rented home near an unimportant river, resentful of those living in the larger homes past which he is walking on his way home from work. The following paragraph introduces another character, whose interior dialogue has actually inspired this post:

From behind him on the path came a series of arrhythmic whacking steps. He glanced back to find Aldo Cummings, an odd duck who, though nearly forty, still lived with his mother. Cummings didn’t work and had his bangs cut straight across and wore gym shorts even in the dead of winter. Morse hoped Cummings wouldn’t collar him.

We see that Morse, a small, struggling, conventional man, fears the possibility of having to interact with this weird character, Cummings. Cummings, for his part, as we shall see below, feels superior to Morse, despite the fact that the Morses of this world would unanimously consider Cummings to be a pathetic loser.

George Saunders masterfully allows Cummings to present himself through the device of the following stream of consciousness paragraphs.  In so doing, Saunders also brilliantly satirizes that which makes bad writing bad, even while pretentious “writers” imagine their adjective-burdened, esoteric-noun-laced  “purple prose” to be brilliant :

Cummings bobbed past the restored gristmill, pleased at having so decisively snubbed Morse, a smug member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Village, one of the league of oppressive oppressors who wouldn’t know the lot of the struggling artist if the lot of the struggling artist came up with great and beleaguered dignity and bit him on the polyester ass. Over the Pine Street bridge was a fat cloud. To an interviewer in his head, Cummings said he felt the possible rain made the fine bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss. The possibility of its ephemeral loss. The ephemeral loss of the day to the fleeting passages of time. Preening time. Preening nascent time, the blackguard. Time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers. Bony fingers pointed as if in admonishment, as if to say, “I admonish you to recall your own eventual nascent death, which, being on its way, human, is forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don’t think its ghastly pass won’t settle on your furrowed brow, pronto, once I select your fated number from my very dusty book with this selfsame bony finger with which I’m pointing at you now, you vanity of vanities, you luster, you shirker of duties, as you shuffle after your worldly pleasure centers.”

            That was some good stuff, if only he could remember it through the rest of his stroll and the coming storm, to scrawl in a passionate hand on his yellow pad. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad, he thought. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad, on which, this selfsame day, the first meager scrawlings which would presage his nascent burgeoning fame would be wrought, or rather writ, and someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they realized what a teeming fragment of minutia, and yet crucial minutia, had been found, and wouldn’t all kinds of literary women in short black jackets want to meet him then!

            In the future he must always remember to bring his pad everywhere.

There are not a few among those publishing their efforts on the various writers’ group pages of Facebook who would profit from the reexamination of their own writing—not to say their own mode of living--in the light of George Saunders’ high satire. 

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Readings: A Tough Pill to Swallow

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This morning I finished reading Leonard Cohen's poetry collection, The Energy of Slaves. Most of the poems were written in the late 1960s. The collection was published early in the 1970s. There are 116 poems in the book. Most of them are very short. Most of them have no title other than a number, although a handful do have titles.

It seems to me to be an angry, bitter book. The short poem I share here, number 114, seems to me to typify the world-view that Cohen creates with these works:


114

Every time my wife has a baby
she goes crazy
she sees the world clearly
and she goes crazy
We have to put her away
so we can get back to the war
Men and women are killed
right in front of the baby

To see the world clearly is to go crazy. I have to admit that it often seems that way.

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Readings & Writings: Shocked and Saddened

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Coming like an echo of a poem I wrote and posted just the other day, are the following paragraphs from the futuristic novel, Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis. The context is that, Paul Bentley, one of a dwindling and degraded population of human beings, in a world now populated primarily by robots, has taught himself to read; a skill that has been lost by the rest of the human race. As a result of his rare skill, he is assigned the task by his robot boss, in what is apparently the archives of the New York University Library, of viewing ancient silent films and making voice recordings of the words from the films’ frames of text. Bentley is also given the equipment necessary to keep a verbal journal of his activities. Below is the entry from Day Twenty-Two of that journal:

XXOne compelling thing that keeps appearing in the films is a collection of people called a “family.” It seems to have been a very common arrangement in ancient times. A “family” is a group of people that are often together, that even appear to live all together. There are always a man and a woman—unless one of them is dead; and even then that one is often spoken of, and images of the dead one (“photographs”) are to be found near the living, on the walls and the like. And then there are the younger ones, children of different ages. And the surprising thing, the thing that seems characteristic of these “families,” is that the man and woman are always the mother and the father of all of the children! And there are older people sometimes too, and always they seem to be the mothers and fathers of either the man or the woman! I hardly know what to make of it. Everyone seems to be related.
XXAnd further, much of the sense of feelingfulness that these films have seems profoundly connected with this being related. And it seem to be presented in the films as good.
XXI know, of course, not to try being a moral judge of anyone. And certainly not of people from another time. I know the life in the films is contrary to the dictum “Alone is best”; but that is not what bothers me. After all, I have spent days at a time with other people—have even seen the same students every day for weeks. It is not the Mistake of Proximity that bothers me about those “families.” I think it may be a kind of shock that the people take such risks. They seem to feel so much for one another.
XXI am shocked and saddened by it.

Here is the poem that I mentioned above:

sin-drome

in old times
they stayed at home
until they married
or even after

XXXXadding to
XXXXrather than subtracting from

now the glue is gone
all is aimed at separation

are we reptiles? fish?
this is wicked

asunder

a cup of filthy twigs
some molted fluff

a random feather

self is a number

XXXXit is not the number one
XXXXself is legion

covered in bright scales

***
When I compare my poem to the excerpt from Mockingbird, well… I am shocked and saddened by it.
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Readings & Writings: Seasonal Verse

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Here is a short, appropriately seasonal, poem by Linda Gregg, from her collection Chosen by the Lion:


Winter Love

I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.

***

Linda Gregg, a new discovery for me—via Czeslaw Milosz’s wonderful anthology A Book of Luminous Things—is a fine poet, imo. Her poems tend to work at uncovering the essential connections between the spiritual and the material, as revealed by everyday acts and things. Thus, her themes touch on the eternal universal.

Here also is a seasonal poem of mine. I have posted it before, somewhere. But this being its month, I post it again:


Ancestral January


blue cold
xxxxxcold white
xxxxxxxxxxfull moon
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxfalse light

stark, hibernal oaks
which scream at the wind
with the rage of old Lear
that all nature has sinned

cold witch in her hut
which white magic can’t warm
nor the storm’s force be tamed
by the pentagram’s form

clouds freeze to the mountain
which north winds strain to stir
frozen spikes of swift crystal
tear the forest’s stiff fur

starved wolf
xxxxxwhite hare
xxxxxxxxxxred snow
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxiron air

icy blade of the lake
bleeds the stone of the shore
fetch rags, my love, quickly
to chink fast the door

what footprints are these
what Eskimo this
who trudges toward spring
with purpling lips

woman, play on your harp
thaw the flames with your song
we’ll wrap us in skins
and drink mead until dawn

***

Stay warm, my friends, if you can’t make it hot.
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Readings: The Uses of Logic

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This brief excerpt is from one of the short stories in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. The title of the piece is "BEG, SL TOG, INC, CONT, REP"--which refers to knitting, and has absolutely nothing to do with the quotation which follows:

Dr. Diamond told a story about the young daughter of a friend. The little girl had found a frog in the yard. The frog appeared to be dead, so her parents let her prepare a burial site--a little hole surrounded by pebbles. But at the moment of the lowering, the frog, which had only been stunned, kicked its legs and came to.
XX"Kill him!" the girl had shrieked.

Doesn't the conspicuous problem of a live frog at its own funeral demand of the rational faculties a common sense solution? And isn't the little girl's quick calculation analogous, for instance, to those we have recently seen made by our political leaders in their conduct of foreign policy? Since the black holes that are our foreign wars have been dug, don't we need to continue to fill them with more shattered corpses in order to justify the initial digging? It's all quite logical, if you think about it.

Well, isn't it?
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Readings: Talk Radio, Back in the Day

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I am currently deep into reading a remarkable novel by Stanley Elkin: The Dick Gibson Show. I don’t like to look ahead while I’m reading, but I can report at this point that the novel is comprised of at least two parts. The first gives us a bit of the boyhood and familial background of ‘Dick Gibson,’ as well as depicting his self-designed apprenticeship in the world of radio, pre-WWII. Part I ends with ‘Dick Gibson’s’ stint, during WWII, as a d.j. on Armed Forces Radio, and a mind-bending hunt for a magical dodo bird on the island of Mauritius.

As Part II opens, ‘Dick Gibson’ (a nom de mic, btw) has established a radio talk show at an AM station in Hartford, CT. Now, this novel is copyrighted in 1970, so it had to have been written by Elkin largely in the sixties. The long excerpt which I’m going to share below is an index of the kind of Special Guests that Dick Gibson has had on his show. What is remarkable about this list is that although it was imagined by Elkin in the 1960s, it could have been imagined by anyone creating a similar character in 2010. Here is Dick Gibson, contemplating the nature of his guests, after having contemplated his audience:

No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones…-- the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought all surgery with a knife was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed that he died the same year Columbus discovered America.

And to imagine that this list is not even close to exhaustive!

The best laugh I got from Part I, btw, was this passage relating the point in the post-adolescence of ‘Dick Gibson’ when he is leaving home to begin his career:

His mother…called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into a sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf.

This book is one hell of a good read.
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Readings: The Current List

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For much of my life I did most of my reading in bed. But I never read in bed any longer. I now do all my reading in my recliner, deep in the basement of my chilly house, often in the company of a cat or two.

People sometimes ask me what I'm reading. This is irksome because I'm never reading just one thing. And when they ask, the full list evades my tongue. And as I mentally grope to run down the full inventory, I see their faces begin to go out of focus after the third title anyway. What I am providing is too much information.

To accommodate this tall stack of titles, I have a small end table of blonde wood next to my recliner. Because this long since proved insufficient to hold a sufficient quantity of volumes, as well as the couple of notebooks I find it necessary to have at hand, I added a snack table, also of blonde wood, next to the end table. It is about an inch higher than the end table. But that's alright. It does the trick. The fact that it is also of blonde wood is just a happy coincidence.

So, in the event that you are one of those people with some curiosity as to what I'm reading, I'm going to provide you with the full list. Read it all, or read it not. Read some of it now and come back later to finish it. Or don't. That's the beauty of it: you choose.

So here we go:

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami (stories)
The Book of Folly by Anne Sexton (poetry)
The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin (novel)
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy (1990)
The Ohio Review - Number Fifty-five, ed. Wayne Dodd (1996)
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (novel)
Anne Sexton - a Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames
Stories from the Sixties, ed. Stanley Elkin
And a Voice to Sing With by Joan Baez (autobiography)
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II

That's the complete list. You see what I'm up against when people ask. I've already posted notes on readings from some of these books, either here or on Facebook. And I'll be posting more. I recommend them all, by the way. That pisses you off some, doesn't it?
_______________________
Addenda: I should mention that I'm also reading The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, but I left that at work. I have Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Towards God at work, too. Sorry.
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Readings: in Eretz Israel

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I am currently reading the novel Wandering Star by recent Nobel laureate, J. M. G. Le Clézio. Below is a beautiful passage from that book—the thoughts of a young, French-Jewish WWII-era refugee girl—sandwiched between two photographs made during my travels.

"But when my father spoke of Jerusalem in the days of King David, he told extraordinary tales. I thought it must be the biggest and most beautiful city in the world, not like Paris in any case, because there surely weren’t dark streets over there, or dilapidated buildings, or broken drainpipes, or smelly stairwells, or gutters in which armies of rats ran free. When you say Paris, some people think you’re lucky—such a beautiful city! But in Jerusalem it was certainly different. What was it like? I had a hard time imagining it, a city like a cloud, with domes and steeples and minarets (my father said there were a lot of minarets), surrounded by hills planted with orange and olive trees, a city that floated over the desert like a mirage, a city in which there was nothing commonplace, nothing dirty, nothing dangerous. A city in which everyone spent his time praying and dreaming."


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Readings: the 'Fifties

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Here is the tattered cover of the only issue I ever bought of a Mad Magazine knock-off called Cracked. The "humor" inside it is extremely lame. It is one of the few magazines and/or comic books from that era that have survived. Unfortunately. This is dated 1959:

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