The Dream (Very Dead)

I had fitful dreams again last night. I can’t really tell if they were inspired by something astrological in nature or perhaps somehow the carbonara sauce went straight to my arteries, constricting blood flow to my brain and crippling the synapses. I woke up constantly only to fall into the same dream, which made it feel all the more lingering and deep.

In the dream I was communicating with a being. We weren’t speaking. It was very telepathic. It was a he. I was shown that there is a difference between being dead and being very dead. He was very dead.

The dead, so it seems, have ego. They also have motivation based in and on ego. They’re rather ugly and frightening creatures who feed their ego choices. This was shown to me like a movie where the dead were depicted as vile gelatinous creatures that killed one another and fed on human attention in all its forms – from fear to praise and worship.

The very dead, on the other hand, were distinctly different. They are formless and colorless. They exist in a state entirely undetectable by the dead. It’s almost like they are spirits in the world of the dead. While the dead are maybe our spirits and ghosts in this world, the very dead are like spirits and ghosts in the world of the dead.

What makes you happy? I asked. He tried to explain but words failed so he showed me. He had me feel the state he lived in. Yes. Words fail. Makes was a silly query, is is sufficient. To describe the state in which he exists, I guess the best I can do is say it is like an extraordinarily contented smile. Hmmm.. it’s a joyful content like being deeply in fully requited love.

How do you communicate? I asked. Again, words failed but he tried. He showed me a computer, a light bulb, electricity. And then he had me feel again, and somehow I just understood. The best word for it maybe is electricity.

How do you become very dead? I asked. He simply laughed. Here I got a bunch of mixed images and impressions. On some level it seemed that if you were killed by the dead it’s possible that you could become very dead. But I didn’t get the sense that this was wholly accurate. There was something more intentional about the becoming of a very dead being. It had to do with a choice to abandon ego, which was/is more difficult than it might seem on the surface.

To abandon a sense of ego isn’t to become selfless or unselfish in some base human understanding of these concepts. It goes beyond our understanding and involves something more profound. It includes giving up one’s investment in our relationship to our others. It’s not giving freely to our fellow beings and relinquishing our own needs. It’s about letting go and abandoning altogether the constructs which hold us together. It’s refusing to play the game or any part in it completely. It may look, by human norms, like complete selfishness because it looks and feels like walking away without concern about how this impacts anyone and everyone. It is a total surrender and abandonment of the social norms we know and hold to be valuable. It’s being willing to give up our past, our present and our future and walk away – and at the moment we do this, the understanding that we have come to as we do this, allows us to do it without fear, regret or concern. If any of these feelings are present, then we’re not ready, then we will not become very dead. Then we are simply not becoming.

When shown so objectively how crude and cruel and ugly the gelatinous monsters are, it’s easy to wonder at why this would be a difficult choice. How could anyone maintain an investment in the status quo of this grotesque and violent culture? It simply is what is for the creatures, however. It’s what they believe being is suppose to be and so they all play by the rules and try to find contentment in it. Yes they laugh, these creatures, in big cartoon gestures – like bullies on the playground in a kid’s movie. But the joy of the creatures are birthed in a kind of violence, in what looks and feels like cruelty – maybe it’s merely a metaphorical violence and it lacks any sense of contentment. And they are equally invested in their dramas, sorrows and fears.

And the very dead have merely made the choice to give up these things (along with the constructs and trappings of that life). And in that moment in the dream it was easy to wonder at why this would be a difficult choice. How easy it would be to let all that go. But I was made to feel how it wasn’t easy at all. How it took courage, resignation and abandon to come to these conclusions. How it involved leaving loose ends to unravel instead of tying them up. How it was like being in the middle of a game where perhaps you were winning or maybe just a bit behind and it was your turn to roll the dice and move. Rather than rolling and seeing the outcome you perhaps set down the dice and wordlessly walk away or perhaps you toss the dice in the air but you walk away before you read them – and you don’t even have a desire to look back to see how your roll might have landed you. And when you hear the angry chatter of your playmates, you remain wholly unmoved save for a quiet little chuckle of contentment and you just walk away, forever.

This was my dream last night. And for whatever it’s worth it leaves me feeling oddly ill at ease today. I’m so aware of my investment in the game. I’m acutely aware of the loops of logic that run in my head that loose ends are meant to be tied, that I can’t just walk away right now, how I’m not ready or able and how it’s not the right time. And I can hear him laughing (I’ve named him, the very dead guy, Richard). I can feel him telling me, Yes, when you are ready it will be easy. When you really feel it you’ll know that you are perpetually in mid-stride, you’ll know that there really never is a good time or a bad time, that it’s always just time. You’ll simply know and you’ll simply do and it will amaze you how easy it is.

Strangely, I know exactly what he’s saying and I wince at this knowing. It’s familiar.

The Mission

We cozy onto the sofa, limb touching limb, legs splayed, the soft hum of the dog snoring against my belly. We watch The Mission and I invariably fall asleep before they slaughter the Indians above the falls. In my world the film always ends merely in foreshadowing debate before Eden is sacrificed.

When I first saw the movie, many years ago, the most poignant scene was when the Indian man severed the rope on Robert Dinero’s penance. I craved that kind of liberation and surrender. Now find the most moving scene to be when Jeremy Irons first meets the Indians whilst sitting on a rock near a river, playing a beautiful melody on a reed instrument. I take this to symbolically mean, perhaps, that I’ve changed from a person seeking freedom to a person seeking beauty.

I love this place. I adore the wet earthy smell in the shade of the towering redwood trees, the smell of the dried grass scorched by the summer sun, the rich black dirt of the land. I love weekends at Stinson and Bolinas – how in the summer the beach is soft and warm and sandy and how in the winter the waves break with more force and rocks wash in from someplace far away. The sheer beauty of this land is transporting – magical, mysterious and beautiful.

This is where I always should have been. This is more home than the City ever offered. It leaves me quiet and thankful.

It Just Happened

How it all happened is so mysterious despite science trying to explain everything. The colors of the bay, blinding white, sky blue, forest green. That this or that would reflect in such a way, divine beauty. No one said, “This is beautiful,” and then made it. It just happened. The unintentionality, the accidental nature, how unconscious it all seems is perhaps the largest wonder. No one could have deliberately made it all so perfect.

Damsels

Damsels climbed the rise

Pitifully beautiful women with scarlet tights.

April is the Cruelest Month

I breathe in the notion that poetry is essential to my life, to a good life, to the rhythm of things. But I haven’t read poetry in a long, long time. The contradiction, it is unsettling. There was a time when I read poetry every day, when silvery slick words poured thick into soft holes of heart and burst. These days are staccato and dissonant. The heart feels stippled like an orange past its ripe. I read it like Braille on the ATM machine. I don’t understand it, but feel hopeful that if I had to I could.

Searching for the Soul...

Searching for the soul of America….

There is an interview with Jacob Needleman in the December 2002 issue of The Sun, called Searching for the Soul of America, about his new book, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. I haven’t read the book and in fact I haven’t even finished reading the interview. I went to San Francisco State University in the 1980’s, and I took a general ed philosophy course from Needleman, intro to philosophy and religion or something of that ilk. He was an inspiring teacher – one of those rare academicians who wasn’t merely a subject matter expert but also has a natural talent for adult education. I still remember texts we read and bits of lectures, one particular on intrinsic will, even a decade hence.

I sit down at my computer and begin to write this in hopes of forcing my mental grammar and perhaps unsticking my stuckness. Now here is an example of what is happening – when I wrote the first paragraph, about not having finished reading the Needlemen interview, my friend Will’s voice echoes in my head saying, it’s the problem with the left, we don’t read anymore. We read what other people think about what other people think about what other people have written, but we don’t actually read and formulate our own opinion. And upon making the proclamation he asks me what I’ve read or what I’m reading lately and I tell him, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, by Martin Prechtel, his own story of becoming a Mayan Shaman among other things. And it reminds me how long it’s been since I’ve been reading this book and how little time I’ve spent to finish it and how it’s moved from something that I’ve really enjoyed to another task on my to-do list. And it reminds me that I need to take what Will said and consider it more deeply, about how this lack of reading the actual texts cripples our ability to reflect, contemplate and integrate new ideas. And it reminds me that I need to call Will, who called nearly two weeks ago now and I’ve yet to touch base back with him and how awful this is given he’s been in poor health of late. And it reminds me that I’ve always wanted to read the Upanishads. And when I wrote how I’m trying to force my mental grammar and unstuck my stuckness a loop began running through my head, “Slaughterhouse Five, Slaughterhouse Five, Slaughterhouse Five… so it goes, so it goes, so it goes….” This is what it’s been like lately. This is how my mind has been working, or perhaps more aptly, not working.

I started reading the Needleman interview while I was on the Larkspur Ferry to San Francisco. The ferry first passes San Quentin State Penitentiary and later Alcatraz. San Quentin used to be a high security prison, notorious for its hardened criminals and stories of the horrors and atrocities that took place in this prison lead to reforms in the prison system in California. While San Quentin still has a high security wing and houses death row inmates, mostly the prison is what guards call a boy’s camp - low security, non-violent offenders, picking up trash on the hillsides. Alcatraz has a great deal of notoriety, maybe least of which is what it represented in terms of a change in the penal system in America. It was the first prison built for punishment as opposed to reform of criminals. Now one can debate whether or not the prison system, as it stands, reforms anyone, but when you look back at some of the founding principals of America, of what those Europeans were escaping, part of what they were escaping was the European justice system. The Founders, in their declarations of independence and in the Constitution were doing many things - among them was the creation of a penal system based on reform as opposed to punishment. Alcatraz was the first admission of failure to truly embrace and achieve that principle.

The Needleman interview, at least what I’ve read thus far, doesn’t talk about or address the American penal system. But reading the interview and pondering the soul of America and contemplating this rediscovery of the wisdom of the Founders – well, it strikes me that the landscape isn’t exactly an accident. I’ve often thought, on my way to work, traversing the Bay in the ferry, that I’m not suppose to allow these institutions to simply blend into the scenery and I’m not suppose to observe them passively…. Water, sea lion, island, bridge, San Quentin, Alcatraz… or maybe I am. Maybe both things are true, look at the parts distinctly, and also the mosaic they create and learn from both stories. I’m not sure. I just don’t want to grow too accustomed to them, like they’re facts. But they are facts. But they’re not. Both things are true, all at the same time.

At any rate… I was listening to one of my favorite radio programs the other evening, This American Life. I don’t actually listen to the radio. I go to the website (http://www.thislife.org) and listen to episodes - sometimes two or three each evening. I was listening to an April 2002 episode (#210) called Perfect Evidence. Act one, Hawks and Rabbits, was the story of three boys, Calvin, Larry and Omar, convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison. After 15 years and the advent of DNA technology, they were able to get a lawyer to take up their case and were released. The biological evidence did not tie them to the crime. The main interviewee of the boys who became men in prison, was amazingly articulate, thoughtful and intelligent. I’m not saying that people in prison are generally not well-spoken or that they’re not intelligent. As one listens to the program, however, it’s hard not to consider that this man’s references and abilities were tendered and cultivated in the context of incarceration. The interviewer never draws attention to this, never pauses after a particularly brilliant observation or thought by the interviewee and just says, “wow.”

During the interview, the wrongly accused and incarcerated man, Omar, is telling the story of how he needed one of his fellow alleged accomplices, Calvin, to sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that he is not an “O secretor” re: his blood type. Calvin wouldn’t sign. The last time he signed something it was a confession, construed and written by police officers, and this landed him in prison for life. In order to move their appeal forward, his signature was required, and Calvin had developed a new policy not to sign anything. He noted, additionally, that he had found God, found religion, accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal savior – that he put his faith in God. “That ain’t the way the God I believe in works,” Omar said. “Your faith in God in good. But act on it. You can’t say you believe in no God and not believe in your own ability to think, reason and understand because he gave you a brain to do just that with.” I thought, “Wow. That’s beautiful.”

Later Omar talks about the Declaration of Independence, which he had read in prison. He says something like this: “When I read that document I was like, wow. How it actually incorporates talking about rebelling against an oppressive government. If the government becomes too oppressive, the power is actually in our hands… That’s why, when you talk to anyone that claims, especially those who speak about the American character and what we should do, you should aks them let me hears youse recite the Declaration of Independence.” And Omar recites, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And you will come to find out that the average American don’t even know it.

In the Needleman interview he says, “In my book I suggest that the deepest purpose of the United States government is to provide conditions under which our society can flourish spiritually as well as materially.”

This is where I want to and all at once do not want to stop. Here’s the mosaic without the mud. But where’s the mud?

The mud is filling the trough that I dug out around the foundation, upon my contractor’s advice, to protect the house. Instead of providing drainage and protecting the foundation, it creates a moat for the water to gather and threatens the stability of things. The mud is filling the ditch Ed dug yesterday in the front yard, to reveal the pipes that have burst coincidental with these downpours that have rendered us without water for nearly a week now. So in the midst of storm front after storm front, winds felling trees and ripping shingles off the roof, hail battering our shelter and water filling the river to its bank, in the house we are dry and parched. For days now I have been contemplating the foundation and I just can’t lightly dismiss the metaphorical implications of all of this.

I don’t put these things together and think that I am a victim or that we’re all victims. To the contrary, I put these things together and I think, “Listen to this story. There are stories being told in our lives and in the landscape and we must listen to the stories.” And perhaps the most resonating words are those reflections from Omar, “Your faith in God is good. But act on it.” How these words arise out of injustices and the pursuit of justice, the landscape of this country, this land, this house – this is not a mistake. This is not merely a coincidence. That the very government of this place, America, might be built on a foundation aimed to inspire spiritual flourishing, that someone would write that and that I would read that while tooling past San Quentin after having just listened to Omar’s words. That is not a mistake. That my own foundation is threatened and how ill equipped I feel to address it, how little I know how to right it. That is not a coincidence.

I’m reading this book that I can’t seem to finish that talks about the Mayan way of life - about how houses aren’t built to endure but to be in a constant state of repair and how this reparation is an event that bonds and strengthens community – ties it together. And I think how the plumber who is suppose to help us fix this leak is my neighbor and how he failed to show up today or even to call despite the week wearing on and his commitment. And I think of how the contractor hasn’t returned my pages or calls for a simple reference for a roofer and how he mislead me around the problems with my foundation. And I think again that these things aren’t merely a coincidence, how these things are not a cosmic mistake – how instead they are telling a story. And this story is both beautiful and shameful – titillating yet difficult to look at.

I am not searching for the soul of America, I’m only searching for my own soul. I work for a non-profit – it’s about the big We. And my inability to work today is perhaps a mirror for how I’m stuck in the big I, how I can’t really find the mud or the glue that holds us all together even when it’s threatening to seep under my own doorway and over my own thresh hold. I see all the pieces, but I don’t see what’s holding them together and I don’t even see the connections between them with striking clarity. I don’t feel my faith in much of anything these days, making it incredibly difficult to act on it.

This really isn’t suppose elicit pity or a sense that this poor girl is stuck. And so here I pause and stretch and look around my cluttered study contemplating that this is not what was intended, this is not how things were supposed to be, and instead of finding my soul I find a stack of paper on the floor, a clutter of this and that, unopened and unpaid bills in little piles amid junk mail and flyers and I think that perhaps I can’t act on my faith, but I might act on clearing the clutter and maybe, in some small way, this will help – but I’m not sure how and I can’t help but think it’s just another distraction. The dog is nestled in pillows on the bed, curled into a cozy ball of warm fur and downy pillows. She’s snoring lightly and it makes me smile.

Salon

sa·lon (s-ln, sln, s-lô) n.

1) A large room, such as a drawing room, used for receiving and entertaining guests.

2) A periodic gathering of people of social or intellectual distinction.

3) A hall or gallery for the exhibition of works of art.

4) A commercial establishment offering a product or service related to fashion: a beauty salon.

[French, from Italian salone, augmentative of sala, hall, of Germanic origin.]

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.