Jefferson won the House vote.
Sometimes reading fiction is difficult. It seems the factual world is more fascinating and unexpected than the fictive.
Looking around we see the models of horrific antagonism and anti-social cynicism.
We long for statesmen like Jefferson and Lincoln.The times are rough and factions draw up edges that are abrasive and unkind. But, many will say, it has always been thus.
Where shall we look?
Who shall we be?
There’s a long view to be taken.
Look out.
It’s here.
Doris sends Billy Collins to help set tone for this coming week.
Despair
(by Billy Collins)
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.(“Despair” by Billy Collins from Ballistics. © Random House, 2008.)
cough, cough, sniffle, cough
throat and lungs all hurt -- who says
I can't catch -- one out
At end of December the lad from Vermont sent me a Shohei Ohtani number 17 baseball shirt. He knows I join millions in respect and delight watching the dual-competent pitcher-hitter play the game. I liked him, and the Angels, even before he signed with the Dodgers. (I hesitate saying the LA Dodgers.)
The lad knows I've never stopped rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers even after they left Flatbush in 1957. Such a refusal to acknowledge a reality makes me sympathetic to the former and to-be president refusing to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. It takes a curious derangement to cling to something not true.
So there's the shirt.
It hangs on the knob of ironing board compartment in kitchen next to louvered doors hiding washer and dryer next to fridge.
It is a lovely short sleeved white shirt with blue lettering. I'll need a baseball under shirt (raglan shirt) with colored sleeves when I wear it. It's only right. As a third basement (with scatter arm) and first baseman (with fielder's glove) during sandlot years, I loved the ritual and sound of the game. As a skinny kid with little power and less raw skill I was little feared and less celebrated.
By the time I got to college there was a former Boston Red Sox pitcher who was our coach and threw batting practice. It was the only time as batter my swings sent balls deep into outfield. My first at bat in league game sent ball over left fielders head. The throw-in scooted away from cut-off man toward dugout and I made it home. If it was recorded as a homer it was my only one.
It was nice of the lad to send the shirt. I know LA won the World Series and Ohtani became the sole occupant of the 50-50 club (50 homers and 50 stolen bases in one season). And I know the odds are even that I'll drop my boycott of the dodgers someday now that Walter O'Malley has left the ballpark. But like giving up my subscription to The Washington Post and no longer watching Morning Joe over their capitulation to an undeserving politician, there has to be some standard of crankiness worth preserving.
For my recent birthday last year a former student sent me a battered baseball and a book on Yogi Berra. It made me smile.
I can't completely mask my appreciation of the game and its history.
There is some joy in Mudville.
Non Commute, I Can’t Go
(by bill halpin, 17jan25)
My throat is the Holland tunnel
Traffic sooting through walls
Holding back Hudson River itching
To crush the Buick from New Jersey
Inching into Manhattan this Friday
Morning of cold January —
It scratches, (my throat), like pickup
In parking lot too close, driver’s door
Banging into tired paint job on fender
As he rushes to get a coffee before
Going upstairs to sell stocks and wink
At Sylvia answering phone at her desk.
There are lessons to be learned sharing
Space with someone sick with RSV for
Two weeks, the commute is not far to your
Welcoming throat and chest no matter how
Slyly you take backstreets and alleyways
In your small house where a sniper has
Taken aim at your health and has received
His fee for putting you down
Which brings me to this morning, which
Does not bring me to prison conversation
With gathered practitioners of healing company.
And so, I park my car next to pickup truck in
Dooryard, key back on hallway knob, hat on hook
Sending this to esteemed friends, with regret,
I am not there, but here, far from midtown, closing
Barn door, holding calls, sipping water, and waiting for
Sniper to run out of bullets, me hiding under brown blanket.
I pray
But I don’t know how to pray
I call god’s name
But I do not know the name
I surrender and submit
But I don’t not know what for
I vote
But . . . How disappointing,
Sin
Four bells
Sea, all’s well
Ice at edges
Mooring balls
On hill
Shove off
As night
Comes nigh
It feels a little off-center. Throat, head, haze and tiredness
At 80 there's no reason to think the rope does not shorten
It is a sideways mantra -- who expected to reach 80
I imagine someone finally saying "You've got this or that
time is short, anyone you want to speak with"
It doesn't seem to faze, time is time, no time is
no time, I'll be right down, saddle my horse,
put oars in dingy, slip energy bar into backpack --
shall I eat a soft-boiled egg, make toast, stoke fire
is there an assassin stalking the edges of policed periphery
where dangerous man smiles and sells bibles, sneakers
guitars and mugshot t-shirts for hundreds of dollars --
not me, not me, I pray for his happier passing, a sweet
kiss from model wife, backslap from conflicted sons,
modular smile from admirers toasting his good luck
distaste in their mouths, they can't give enough to him
like Jesus, this new savior, christianity without christ
indulgences and forgiveness without confessing
catacomb heart and freezer mind pondering revenge
retaliation, retribution, resentment -- he has never been
given enough -- no one knows how great he is, fools,
all of them
I will come to love this man
I will see him in heaven, favorite of the saints, I will
sit next to him and hear his complaints -- God isn't what
he's chalked up to be, the place is a dump, the water
doesn't flush correctly, where are my slippers and pipe --
There are only three things worth anyone's time:
to be feared
to be better than everyone
to own everything you can --
I wonder where the priests have gone, I wonder where
kindness has gone
I wonder why these final days seem so disorienting --
I have grown old
my prayers know only silence
I gassho the night and squeak snow underfoot
The great joy in life is not knowing
I do not know what follows this
nor if there is any hope
which, strangely, satisfies me
I smell soup
God is good
Zen mind is not Zen mind.
That is, if you are attached to Zen mind,
Then you have a problem,
And your way is very narrow.
Throwing away Zen mind
Is correct Zen mind.
Only keep the question,
“What is the best way of helping other people?”
--Seung Sahn
In the mid 1970s I sat in a chair off to the side where Seung Sahn, in the former church owned by WBAI.fm on upper west side of Manhattan, was interviewed by Lex Hixon on his weekly show "In The Spirit" on a Sunday morning. I arrived at the front door just as the the zen folks arrived. The crew from the Providence Zen Center thought I was with WBAI, and WBAI thought I was with the Zen Master. I was the only person in the so-called audience during the two hour session.
A perfect middle way.
I liked the Korean Zen Master. "Only go straight, don't know; Only don't know, go straight." It was a plain way to sum up the zen view of this existence.
Ok, fifty years later, throw away everything you think you know. Throw away Seung Sahn. Throw away Lex Hixon. Throw away the recollection of zen practice and christian contemplation -- those twin oxen pulling the cart of curious investigation through muddy roads with bumpy holes filled with gravel alongside drooping cornfields and railway tracks held by tar and spikes.
Even volunteering has been narrowed from seven places to two. I wander where I've been and do not recognize anyone and am not recognized by anyone.
I sit zazen in waiting rooms where technicians sound bells inside cylindrical tomblike torpedo shafts, and women with needles make me bleed and tape me up. Corridors of the wounded who are wheeled to other corridors disappearing through doors that mysteriously open then click closed.
At Rockport harbor I watch ice at edges of pilings sidle up in high tide. I sip coffee, eat roll with no butter the young man forgot to put in bag. I toss a piece to the begger seagull perched nearby.
Idiorhythmic, I think. My current practice is an idiorhythmic drift between tides oscillating circles navigating channels buoying sunup and sundown, dark blue dusk and rose gray dawn.
"What is" is the best way of helping people.
He was right.
And what is "what is"?
One hundred percent correct relationship!
All the traditional expressions of religion fade.
All the alternative neologisms of spirituality do not gain traction.
What is left?
What remains is the walk to gate to open or close it.
The walk back to barn passing overturned dinghy under bookshed light.
Moon on snow
Cold on everything
Prospect of death looking out from night path up mountain —
I would take the cocktail
After one last double chocolate donut
A final bell chant
There's a need to cut off confusion.
Watching Senate Armed Services Committee question nominee Hegseth for Secretary of Defense position, I am reminded of Chinul:
Some people, not knowing the essential emptiness of good and evil, think practical cultivation of mind means to sit rigidly immobile, subduing mind and body, like a rock placed on top of grass.
This is ludicrous. That is why it is said that followers cut off confusion in every state of mind, yet the mind that does the cutting off is a brigand. Chinul (1158-1210)
You can't catch someone out about any fact, however documented and obvious, if they simple deny and obfuscate with the support and approval of partisan-minded aficionados who are in the majority. What we call "truth" is a sometimes thing.
We're not dealing with facts, we're experiencing mind -- that which is burrowed deep within the Within, a place seldom visited by side-takers and self-aggrandizers. The outside dwellers know (vaguely) only the outside. This is where love has gone to die. Where it loses breath and -- like the sonic beating of an MRI claustrophobia cadence -- searches the body for signs of any residual interiority.
T h e triple world is blazing in defilement as if it were a house on fire. I How can you bear to tarry here and complacently undergo such long suffering? If you wish to avoid wandering in samsara there is no better way than to seek Buddhahood. If you want to become a Buddha, understand that Buddha is the mind. How can you search for the mind in the far distance? It is not outside the body. The physical body is a phantom, for it is subject to birth and death; the true mind is like space, for it neither ends nor changes. Therefore it is said, "These hundred bones will crumble and return to fire and wind. But One Thing is eternally numinous and covers heaven and earth."
It is tragic. People have been deluded for so long. They do not recognize that their own minds are the true Buddhas. They do not recognize that their own natures are the true dharma. They want to search for the dharma, yet they still look far away for holy ones. They want to search for the Buddha, yet they will not observe their own minds. If they aspire to the path of Buddhahood while obstinately holding to their feeling that the Buddha is outside the mind or the dharma is outside the nature, then, even though they pass through kalpas as numerous as dust motes, burning their bodies, charring their arms; crushing their bones and exposing their marrow, or else write sutras with their own blood, never lying down to sleep, eating only one offering a day at the hour of the Hare [5 to 7 A.M.], or even studying through the entire Tripitaka and cultivating all sorts of ascetic practices, it is like trying to make rice by boiling sand -- it will only add to their tribulation. 3 If they would only understand their own minds, then, without searching, approaches to dharma as numerous as the sands of the Ganges and uncountable sublime meanings would all be understood. As the World Honored One said, "I see that all sentient beings everywhere are endowed with a tathāgata's wisdom and virtue.'" He also said, "All the illusory guises in which sentient beings appear take shape in the sublime mind of the tathāgata's complete enlightenment."5 Consequently you should know that outside this mind there is no Buddhahood which can be attained. All the Buddhas of the past were merely persons who understood their minds. All the sages and saints of the present are likewise merely persons who have cultivated their minds. All future meditators should rely on this dharma as well.
I hope that you who cultivate the path will never search outside. The nature of the mind is unstained; it is originally whole and complete in itself. If you will only leave behind false conditioning, you will be "such" like the Buddha.'
(--in Secrets on Cultivating the Mind, by Susim Kyǒl, pp 140-41)
If we do not understand the mind we settle for preferences and opinion. If we understand the mind -- wisdom and virtue are heard in conversation.
There might not be much hope for the structures of governance with its contentious manipulation and divisive dismembering of what once we valued as truth. Smug dissembling, shucking and jiving, opting for convenient mistruths -- these flood airways and print columns, and dissociative social media.
"All the Buddhas of the past were merely persons who understood their minds." This reflection gives pause as we wonder where the Buddhas of the present dwell.
I suspect it is not outside the body.
Let me in whee-ooh (whee-ooh, whee-ooh, hoop-whee-ooh)
(Whee-ooh, whee-ooh, hoo-ooh-oop-whee-ooh, whee-ooh)
("Let Me In" by The Sensations, 1962)
Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
. . .
The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
--Stanley Kunitz
This is one of the benefits of having such an elder.
And there having been a Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
Gracias!
I know why so many
do not like poetry
because it is being
written
To see in words
what is unforseeable
in ordinary experience
feels
Like early fog
over bog and hills
There and not there
Simultaneously
We are not comfortable
with ghosts or wraithful
near-appearances like
memory or dreamstates
Poetry
Presents the world
we seldom see — particular,
inter-dimensional, near
Feeling itself feeling Itself
as man in prison said:
“this, and this, and this —
I do not know that”
Poem becomes for so
many the whole of their
lives seen from center
out in all directions
Centrifugal, as high as deep,
wide as infinite interior,
as specific as speculative —
*Nowhere, nowhere
to be, found
Will you marry
me?
No!
Thank you . . .
Don’t ask again.
Ask what?
In prison this morning,
wondering whether rivers
and mountains
going on without us (so it seems)
actually carry us along
(How?)
We don’t know
We cannot yet fathom
How the feeling-spiritual
The way we remain with
Everything we’ve touched
Felt and seen
Continuing (seemingly)
undetected
But there
Along for the unfinishing life
unborning and undeathing
looking out
through swelling droplet
and bare branch
over everything
(How?)
clearly undifferentiated
with neither
Noise
nor
Smoke
I know who to blame
for Los Angeles fires
for small fee I'll tell
(ka ching) -- Here is my report --
it was a dragon -- it was
We’re waiting for something already here
It wears our name and slips on our shoes
We wait
The way stream-bed waits when downpour
Runs through it with abandon
You don’t have to say anything to me
I’ve been listening to you since last lifetime
When you crossed the road to gather horse
Back to gate and inside
We’ve always been lovers
Like rushing water and unsettled stone
Beside the inclines of footpaths moving away
By not understanding
human/earth kinship, cosmos
Ponders suicide —
What hotline can be called —who
will talk us down from the edge
What do you know about love?
I’d like to look into it.
Are you in love?
There is nothing outside love.
What is nothing like?
Just like this.
There was a time Sunday meant church
A punctuation of week
These days landscape of snowy trees
Sun on freshly fallen overnight white
Lovely quiet voice of God bird singing
Cracking seed flying back to feeder
Everything remains as it is where it is —
dusting snow falling from branch
Ground feeders dance aside one
another their eucharistic uncovering