anger

Sometimes I get so angry, angry at myself, at people in my life, at people who have never even thought about my existence at all. Sometimes I sit quietly, sometimes I pray, sometimes I shake in rage.

And sometimes I watch this:

Then I feel better.

ps-It’s really better if you go to youtube and watch in high quality.  I promise.

…

…

What are we all doing?

And why is this one of the most affecting songs I’ve ever heard?

unintended

The other day a friend and I got together far too late at night, drank far too many beers, and stayed up much too late; we did this because she has a crazy schedule at the moment, and I don’t get off of my new job until 5.30, which means I get home at 7pm usually, thus leaving precious little time for things like friends. But we hadn’t spoken in a while beyond the silly phone conversations that you have when you don’t really have time talk, when you’re both rushed and on your way to do something else. That’s not really the point.

The point is, she asked me what I wanted, after we’d had a few drinks and I was feeling more honest than usual (not that I go around spouting untruths and misleading everybody….or do I?), and not what I wanted in the sense of ‘Hey do you need another beer?’ but in the sense of ‘What do you want, you know, out of this whole existence thing?’–an entirely different animal. And without thinking, I said ‘A family…that, and to change the world. That’s what I want.’ I wasn’t joking, I’m pretty sure. Those are the things I want. I want to be a husband and a father, and raise little boys and girls into strong men and women who know honor and decency and love; to go to their soccer games and their school plays and have stupid family vacations in strange national parks that no one else’s dad thinks are cool, preferably involving a station wagon of some sort, because that’s what I remember from my childhood. I want to love my wife and never leave (whoever she is) and be a father to my children (whenever they get here, hopefully before I’m too old). That, and change the world. I’m not even sure what I meant when I said this, but when I look around, when I ride the bus through West Ashley and down Spring St. every day, twice a day, I see a world with so much pain. I see beauty, I see numberless faces who make me smile, but I also see this world cleaved from what is good and just. My heart threatens to burst, and I know that we can do better. We have to do better. Even though we might not like to admit it, especially in America, we rise or fall together, and we, as a people, as a global community, are only as high as our lowest number. While chains exist anywhere, we will never be free. While hunger lives, we will never be fed. We are a people grown callous, cocooned in our first world bubble of prosperity and wealth (myself, more than anyone); we are a people from whom the saints would, or should, it seems, recoil. If they did not, it would only be because they were better than we. We would give up liberty for false safety, honor for money, righteous struggle for shameful acquiescence. I see this in myself, I see it around me. I am a coward, frozen in my soul, and I don’t know what I Should Do, in the largest sense.

To be a good person, to change the world, is it enough to be a good father and husband? Is it enough to tend my little corner, and hope that the (hopefully) lessons of justice and love and honor taught to children and students (there will probably be students in my future, let’s be honest) ripple outward from the thrown in pebble? Is that enough? Or is that selfish? I can’t help but think of Simon Peter and Andrew; they didn’t listen to what Christ had to say and go back to their nets and think about it. They heard him, threw their nets down, and followed. James and John left their father, alone, old, and followed.

They walked the path, as have so many others. We stand peeking through our fingers.

unexpected

So I have a job; it was surprising, in that I applied to it last September, didn’t hear from them for quite a while, and then they called me up and asked me to reapply at the very end of April. Then I had a crazy little group interview, and 3 days later they offered me a job. A real job, with a salary, my own desk, a new computer (just for me!), my own phone, a key to the building (two buildings, in fact), and on and on. As to what it is, it’s a position at The History Press, a small publishing house based here in Charleston, SC, with one other office in Salem, MA. My official position is ‘Graduate Trainee,’ which means I am a sort of junior editor/editorial assistant (EA, in the lingo, btw). Hence the long absence, what with all the settling in and such. Also long work days make it hard to do anything but fall into bed, much less go for a run or write a blog post, you know? So I’ve been there for just over three weeks, and I am kind of in love with the place; it fits, with a few hiccups, the image I’ve been carrying around (without realizing it, of course) of what job should be like, with smart people who know what they’re doing, care about the quality of their work, and don’t treat me like an idiot because I haven’t been there that long. So if you find yourself needing to write a book focused on local and/or regional history, I’m you’re man. Call me. Seriously.

The time that hasn’t been spent doing neat things at work has been fairly consumed with trying to figure out where/how to live now that I’ve got a whole ‘adult life’ thing going on, which is slightly terrifying. Since my roommate is leaving at the end of July, several options present themselves, some of them more expensive than others but really neat (such as living alone in downtown Charleston in a sweet studio or some such), some are financially sensible (such as staying where I am and finding another roommate or moving downtown with a roommate), and some are kind of in between (such as staying where I am without a roommate or living on the third floor of a normal, regular family’s home downtown). Since I haven’t even received my first paycheck yet, I am slightly wary of budgeting for swanky downtown living, but July is fast approaching. Any reader input here, anybody?

Also, in case no one told you, Barack Obama is just fantastic:

duchenne smiles

Here in Charleston, as many will know, we have a great little thing called the City Paper. Now, I’m a loyal reader of this publication; lately, there’s been a new addition to the City Paper: 11:11, a magazine centered on ‘Living, Knowing, Being.’ It’s very new-agey, kind of weird but sort of interesting sometimes. Riding the bus today, I came across an article on smiling. Apparantly, and I did not know this, there is only one form of the smile that you can tell reflects inner joy/happiness: the Duchenne Smile, named for Guillaume Duchenne, a crazy french doctor who lived during the 19th century. When someone smiles a Duchenne Smile, different sets of muscles are put into play, in particular the upper face around the eyes (the Zygmatic Muscles ). Thus, when a smile incorporates these muscles, the eyes crinkle, forming crow’s feet on the skin.

Now, I thought this was pretty interesting, considering that a) I love trivia like this and b) it made me think about my own smiles, and the faces I make in various situations. I realized, upon some consideration, that I am prone to the type of smile that borders on the smirk, with the left side of my mouth upturned and my lips closed or parted very slightly. When I chuckle without taking a breath, that’s what my mouth does (it’s almost always the left side of my face). If I laugh open mouthed, or smile broadly, then I actually pull more with the right side of my face, and I tend to pull my upper lip upwards (like most folks) showing my teeth.

The ‘True Smile,’ the Duchenne Smile, where my whole face gets involved, happens more than I thought it would, especially here lately. I take this to be a good thing, since, apparently, it reflects an actual state of mind and not some forced cheerfulness. And certain people seem to bring it out, often; them, and then the random, unexpected things in which we sometimes find honest humor or pleasure. The jasmine on the vine, small children tottering along and talking to themselves, or, this one time, the rain falling hard on Vanderhorst St. in downtown Charleston. It was dusk, and as the large droplets hit the pavement, you could see them rebound into the air becuase of the shining lights of cars; they hit the blacktop and then bounced into the air in an expanding cone of movement. It looked like they were dancing sideways in the wan light. I grinned for about an hour.

Also, lately the song Go Places.

the Big Things

Earlier today, while on facebook, I changed my status to ‘Daniel is thinking about the Big Things.’ And while I couldn’t ignore the irony that updating my status on facebook was in no way one of the Big Things, it was true as far as those kinds of declarations are. Lately, and really for the past year, with only a pointless job in food & bev to occupy serious chunks of my time, I’ve thought a lot about the things that we’re told you’re supposed to figure out in college; maybe I just missed the memo. Don’t get me wrong, I loved college, defending my ideas and working out what I thought about texts and beliefs and all that jazz, but I have to agree with those who see the dissolution of any overarching system of guidance or values in higher education (not that I think that disintegration of the overwhelming white, Western, and male system of values and behavior is necessariy a negative). I guess that I was just looking for something to color in the holes that I came to Charleston with. To put it another way, I learned about and debated Aquinas’ proof of the existence of god without deciding whether or not she/he exists; I argued the coherence of capitalis systems as opposed to socialist, but didn’t decide whether or not one was evil or good (although, based on things I’ve read outside the curriculum, I have to come down against capitalism). I learned to grapple with these problems that I had trouble placing in a context of material reality and moral behavior. Had I been raised with a set of coherent strictures, such as a religion or a systematic philosophy, I wouldn’t have had so much trouble, I think, I wouldn’t have been so adrift; I would have had a system against which to measure the validity of ideas, found concordance or dissonance among the bewildering array of new thoughts I encountered. But I didn’t, so I did that only against the somewhat diffuse set of morals I’ve developed over the last few years.

Which brings me to the big things. Being outside of all of that, moving beyond the environment of abstraction into a world of concrete reality, has forced me to consider the things that matter as a matter of actually living life, the process of becoming in this world. Chief among them, god/God/Allah vs. atheism/agnosticism/non-theism/etc. It seems sometimes that I spend an inordinate amount of time focused on questions of belief, on the systems that make sense (or not, as is more likely) to me. This is hardly new; although those who know me may not realize it, I considered very seriously becoming Catholic for about a year, eventually deciding against it for a variety of reasons (which was in turn a very different place to be than when I was entering college and still thought of myself as an Objectivist in the Randian sense, or at least an atheist, and is in turn a spectrum’s length away from the strange aggregate of Zen Buddhism, socialist ethics, and perhaps Sufism that I find myself having much in common with today).

So religion preoccupies me, constantly shifting places with questions of love and relationships; I hesitate to share to much, but suffice it to say that I’ve learned much in the last year, about myself and about the way to be alone and the the need not to be. Even these wanderings of the mind, the constant spinning of tales in my head, is eventually plowed back into questions of belief, questions of the Cause and the Root, or at least the Purpose (such as, do I have one? Is it constructed by Western society, and is that necessarily a bad thing?) Should this Purpose be subordinate to personal satisfaction, or should I even be thinking about personal Love and societal Love, Eros and Agape, as dualities or as shards of the same vessel? And why do I naturally place a wall between these parts of my psyche, the wants and the needs, needing comfort and requiring something larger from myself? Because who am I if I don’t do something, if I am not able to shift the course of events from this to that, from good to better? Of course, this tension is mostly in my head, and not real, but the seemingly unshakeable belief that the duality is real makes it real to me, even if I know that it’s not; my perceptions create my reality, as egomaniacal as that may sound.

So the big things, God and Love. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. Or send you a copy of the book.

time to dabble in the arts

I’m not a creative person. Well, perhaps that’s not quite right; I should say that I was never taught that being creative, that expressing some sense of the artistic, was important. Part of this is just the way I was raised. After all, someone has to do the chores, and what with homework and all, what time could there have been for frivolous pursuits like art or music? I wasn’t discouraged really, from being an artistic little boy. I went along with music class in elementary school, after all, banging those silly blocks (or sometimes sticks) together to give some sort of mystical beat; when we had to sing, I sang loudly, which will surely shock those of you who know me now (or perhaps not, considering my proclivities to foot tapping and the singing of lousy pop songs at my desk). But for the most part, my….energies found other outlets. My imagination found activity in the works of others, in science fiction movies, tv shows, and especially books. I never found it difficult to dwell in the possibilities presented by authors writing of other worlds or times or in the spaces in between the stars. In fact, it is probably true that I felt more comfortable in these places than I felt in my own home, some of the time. That was a role I enjoyed, from an early age: a receiver of the creative efforts of others, of a critic (dare I detect a foreshadowing of my collegiate endeavors?) rather than a creator of those works myself.

No one ever challenged me to foster or develop creative talents on my own part. I play no instruments, I can’t hold a tune, I can’t draw very well or paint at all, and my attempts at creative writing are laughable in their heavy-handedness. When I come into contact with people who are creative, who can act, or write, or paint, or sing or play the piano, I am somewhat amazed, for that is an area of human activity that I fundamentally don’t understand. Even when I used to blacksmith in high school, I tended to make things like hinges and fireplace sets instead of sculptures or the like.

I’m not given to flights of fancy or bouts of carefree dancing; in fact, it has been said I have a serious nature. I wonder how much of that is wrapped up in, is bound within the idea that I was never encouraged to lose a sense of conscious effort for whatever I’m doing? Some of the only times when I lose myself, when I act not without thought but on the other end of thought, with focus beyond the activity itself (look at Keats’ Negative Capability and you’ll see kind of what I’m talking about) is when I have written certain papers or when I run for long stretches of time. I can’t help but thinking that I’m missing out on an activity that is in our basic natures, the irrational exuberance of creativity; I know that I wouldn’t have painted the cave walls at Lascaux, and that I probably would have gotten angry that whoever was painting them was wasting time we could be using to hunt. Perhaps I simply haven’t yet found the key needed to unlock my vaults of expression. I’m on the lookout.

the 2nd noble truth

So it is here that we find ourselves: Existence and dukkha are inseparable. Life is dis-ease; things fall apart, they do not come together. Entropy is the hallmark of reality. Very well, the 2nd noble truth: The origin of dukkha is craving.

From the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: “And this, monks is the noble truth of the origination of dukkha: the craving that makes for further becoming — accompanied by passion & delight, relishing now here & now there — i.e., craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.”

First things first. What exactly is craving, the hinge on which this whole definition pivots? The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘craving’ (in its first, obsolete, but highly relevant meaning) thus: ‘To demand (a thing), to ask with authority, or by right.’ In real life, how does this manifest itself? The first, and most obvious, is a desire for sensations, the craving for things that make us feel good. This attachment to sensuality (kama tanha) is easy to understand. Think about food that tastes good. At the time, we know it tastes good; if it tastes good enough, when we are not enjoying the sensation it gives, we desire to have that sensation again, we desire to feel the same pleasantness in the future. This operates from moment to moment. While eating, we want to take another bite to recapture the sensation after only a moment of being without it. And as we are experiencing the pleasurable sensation, is it ever really far from our minds that there will soon be a time that we shall be without that sensation? We are uneasy while we are not experiencing pleasurable sensation, we are uneasy while we are. This is clear with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, with the sun on our face and the cold wind blowing through our coats. This is the craving for sensual pleasure first named in the above quote. This is kama tanha.

More subtle is the desire, the craving for becoming. These are, in part, divorced from the material world, and this craving exists in the realm of the immaterial. This form of craving, bhava tanha, is the desire to become something, someone, some state that you do not presently reside in. Bhava tanha has been styled the “realm of ambition and attainment;” we seek to be wealthy, to be happy, to find contentment, to find peace, to be passionate, to care, to be in a state of happiness. I want to be spiritual, I want to be enlightened, I (and this is particularly something I struggle with) want to understand, I want respect, I want authority, I want the American dream, I want love, I want children, I want, I want, I want……The list could be extended until the end of time. We desire these things because of the way they make us feel, in a way that is different from the simple causation of physical stimuli; the first form of craving pleasures our body; the second pleasures our minds.

Just as subtle, just as difficult to understand as a negative, is the craving for not-becoming, the opposite of the craving for becoming. Yet really how opposite is this craving, in its essentialism? The desire to not-become is the reverse side of the coin of craving; desire to become and the desire to not become share the same root, craving. The craving to not-become (vibhava tanha) structures itself in the same way as the desire to become: I want to overcome the material, to get rid of my attachment to the world; I want to get rid of suffering, of jealousy, of fear, of desire itself, of pain, of greed, of evil, of any state.

Unreasonably, we constantly strive for a state that is not our own; we constantly attempt to escape the dis-ease in which we constantly find ourselves. We assume the universe owes us this (even if we won’t say so, even if we work for these things there is the assumption that we deserve a reward), we assume it is our right to feel good, to be one things and not another. Those things are good, but it is important to realize that existence owes us nothing, that asking for these things, that striving for them, in this way, is as senseless as railing at the rain for making me wet.

These are all a reflection of dukkha, of dis-ease; no condition is permanent, no sense lasts forever, no state will survive more than an ephemeral little while, be it positive or negative. To crave, to desire, any sensation or state of being is folly, for it will pass, it will change, and you will be left with nothing but an attachment to what once was or will be, not what is now.

Part of the 2nd truth is realizing that even these thoughts, the desire of sensation, the desire to be and not-be, are themselves impermanent. They masquerade in our day to day lives as permanent ideas to be attained, or to be avoided, on and on; recognizing desire for what it is, the yearning for permanence in an inherently impermanent universe, is vital to overcoming them (thought he word ‘overcoming’ has many connotations undesirable to this argument; perhaps a more cogent term would be an acceptance and discarding of them….)

As another has eloquently stated, “[d]esire has power over us and deludes us only as long as we grasp it, believe in it and react to it.” It should be noted, as well, that this is a formulation of a middle way between asceticism and gluttony. It is foolish to deny that, for instance, we need food to live. However, we should not latch onto food, becoming gluttonous; nor should we forgo food, and starve ourselves-whatever the reason. We should recognize that food is necessary, and let it go at that. Any more and any less veers into sensuous desire, craving for a state of becoming or not-becoming. Recognizing these cravings dispassionately, for what they are-ephemeral states of thought that will pass- without judging them as good or bad, without attempting to quash them or to indulge in them, without craving to be free of them or desiring to be without them (or with them, conversely), but simply growing aware of these cravings, is the first step to going beyond them, as will be discussed soon with the 3rd noble truth.

Reflections on the 2nd noble truth: Seems sensible enough to me. That there is suffering, dis-ease, dukkha, in this world, seems almost inarguable; the old cliche about the grass always being greener on the other side helps me to realize this. There’s a reason everyone knows what that means, because most of us instinctively see the world as consisting of states of ease and dis-ease. Realizing that every moment contains within in it’s own dukkha is the first step; the next is figuring out where dukkha comes from. It comes, as the second truth claims, from craving, from desiring, from grasping for desire-for sensual pleasure, for ways of life, for states different than your own. These cravings chain us, like Satan in his lake and Prometheus on his rock, further into the cycle of samsara and the the sway of dukkha. By opting out, as it were, from the interplay of desires, by understanding craving for what it really is, can we….forget about grasping. When we become comfortable in the eternity of now, the present without past or future (not by ignoring either, but by not becoming beholden to them), when we understand the sensations and cravings and desires we are subject to as part of dukkha, then we can begin to be unbound by them.

the 1st noble truth

Just because I don’t go to church with any sort of regularity doesn’t mean that I’m not searching, not looking for….something.  And of all the faiths/creeds/philosophies/systems I’ve encountered and looked in to, Buddhism seems the most right.  Hardly an objective standard, I know, but it just seems to make sense in so many ways.  So, to work through some of my own ideas about the basic tenets of (most schools of) Buddhism, I’m going to look at, first, the Four Noble Truths.  Thus, the 1st noble truth, the noble truth of dukkha.

From the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Buddha’s lecture/discussion on the four noble truths:  “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.”  This is usually translated as “Life is suffering,” but, from what I can understand (and remember), this is a little simple.  It’s more accurate to say that ‘Life is dukkha,’ a much more nuanced meaning.

So, what is dukkha? It is pain, it is suffering, it is stress, it is unsatisfactoriness, anxiety, longing, loss, want, etc., etc; the meaning that makes the most sense to me (and to which i am indebted to Zeff Bjerken and my freshman Religious Studies class on Buddhism for) is ‘dis-ease.’  No matter the situation, no matter the state of mind, there is always a profound sense of ‘dis-ease.’  Think of a lousy situation, like you get fired from your job.  This sucks for obvious reasons:  how are you going to pay the bills?  Perhaps it brings on a crisis of self-confidence (Did i deserve to be fired?). Or anger (That Bastard fired me!).  It seems really easy to see dukkha in the situations where we expect to find what we think of as suffering, as pain.  More subtle, though, are the situations where we do not expect to find ‘dis-ease.’  Spending time with someone you love, for instance. Even with someone you love, there is always a sense of dukkha in your mind:  Do they love me?  How do I know they love me?  I will soon be parted from them.  When will I see them again? Why are they ignoring me?  Why are they paying so much attention to me?  On and on.

Dukkha is always present.  Another definition, from The Three Basic Facts of Existence:

“Disturbance, irritation, dejection, worry, despair, fear, dread, anguish, anxiety; vulnerability, injury, inability, inferiority; sickness, aging, decay of body and faculties, senility; pain/pleasure; excitement/boredom; deprivation/excess; desire/frustration, suppression; longing/aimlessness; hope/hopelessness; effort, activity, striving/repression; loss, want, insufficiency/satiety; love/lovelessness, friendlessness; dislike, aversion/attraction; parenthood/childlessness; submission/rebellion; decision/indecisiveness, vacillation, uncertainty.”

Particularly interesting are the pairs of opposite states were we find dukkha: aimlessness/striving, submission/rebellion, aversion/attraction.  The 1st noble truth holds that the world we are in, the world we are attached to, is a world of suffering, even when it doesn’t seem to be.  The world, as it is, is one that is incapable of satisfying us because we are always left with a sense of unease.

This makes a lot of sense to me.  It boils down to life is hard-for everyone.  Some lives are harder than others, its true; after all, I myself tend to have more sympathy for the poor among us who perhaps never get the chances they deserve than the rich who don’t have to try nearly as hard for anything.  Life is much easier for them, or so it would seem.  Of course, that’s not true, or at least I can not know the interior life of their minds, these privileged individuals.  After all, they may be just as unsatisfied, just as in ‘dis-ease,’ with their world as I am with mine and the homeless man in Charleston is with his.  We are united in suffering, united in the unfulfilled nature of this world, though it may take many forms, interior and exterior, tears or laughter.  We live in the same world, a world that fundamentally fails to provide us with contentment.  This, again, makes a lot of sense; I don’t feel that many would argue that material things ever brought anyone true happiness; they can ease your cares, make life easier, but they will never, ever provide a deep sense of contentment and/or achievement.  The things most worth doing are the things you cannot touch or measure.

So, do I agree with the 1st noble truth?

Yes.  So what comes next?

on Religion

I wasn’t raised in a church; my family was, I think, nominally Christian. This meant that we were occasionally told not to use Jesus’ name as an exclamation of surprise or displeasure (a rare kind of censure) and that at Christmas, we were read the story of Christ’s birth and reminded by my mother that there was more to the holiday season than gifts (which always seemed to make sense to me). My first girlfriend, in the 10th grade (late bloomer, yes I was), was a Southern Baptist. This was irrelevant at the time; so naive I was, I thought this would have little to do with out relationship until I realized that I was expected to attend church with her family, at least once in a while. So I went, a total of 3 times. Each time I was offended by something (and this was before I even began to have my current ‘liberal’ opinions and justifications I have developed over the last few years). In particular, I recall some exceedingly ignorant and offensive comments about Muslims and Buddhists. So, I never really got into the whole ‘Baptist’ scene in my hometown. A little later on, I became quite good friends with a Catholic, a rare and exotic species of which I think there are about 7 (perhaps 9 or 10) in Sumter, SC. I went to mass with her one time, a few days after September 11. I came to college unattached to any creed, orthodoxy, or church. Very quickly, I fell into the whole ‘I’m in college and religion is a myth, a patriarchal institution of control which developed as a tool to control a restive population and enforce rigid sexual codes which has largely been discredited by the critical revolutions of the mid 20th century and the sexual revolution of the 1960s’ mindset’–All of which I do think is kind of true.

The trouble with that was, I had some friends who were quite religious; in my head I’ve always called them the Catholic crew (you know who you are, I’m sure). They were, for the most part, sincere in their beliefs, not evangelical in their outlook, and lived lives remarkably similar to mine-sometimes surprisingly so. I was a little in awe, I’ll be honest, although sometimes it was displayed in unexpected ways. It was all these folks, in part, that led me to begin to re-examine the rather cavalier attitude I hadn’t even realized that I had developed toward any serious experience of spirituality or religion. For some personal reasons, I even started going to Catholic Mass at the local Cathedral; I realized I was finding meaning in places I’d never looked before, in the words of Christ and Christian writers. I discovered C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, as well as the words of Mark, John, Luke, and Matthew. Of course, I still had/have….issues with organized systems of religious thought; mostly I, personally, find them constrictive, and more focused on following rules than with the place where they began, in a communion with God/Jesus/Yahweh/, whatever the case may be.

Which, I suppose, is why I appreciate Thomas Merton; he approaches God and Christianity from another angle of personal involvement, one that stresses the sense of discovery and awareness of a being with and involved with God/Everything rather than subservient to his draconian rules given from on high. A question of emphasis, since he was, of course, a good Catholic. To me, however, he transcended the bounds of his faith, rather than becoming constricted by them; God is to be discovered by contemplation, not by blindly following strictures that might not make any sense at all, not by mindless obedience, but by introspection and a development of awareness and integration and a place in the universe that can’t be enforced by rules, but comes from the interior realization of truth.