a battered baseball

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.

incommunicado, on taking a sick day

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.

vete y no peques más

 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

it could be

 Yes

If I only had 

one thing to say

It could be

Yes

lay it up with care

 Four bells

Sea, all’s well

Ice at edges

Mooring balls

On hill

Shove off

As night

Comes nigh

the oncological argument

politics is where

opinion goes

to metastacise 

these final days seem so disorienting

 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 

only keep the question

Just yesterday I was nobody.

Then today I am still nobody.

How does such luck befall?

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!

at some point it’s silly to keep trying

 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

it is not outside the body

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)

at the bottom of our minds

 Doris, our elder, sends Stanley Kunitz from New York's Hudson Valley:

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! 

πουθενά, ουδαμού*

 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

all being is nuptial, someone once wrote

Will you marry 

me?

No!

Thank you . . .

Don’t ask again.

Ask what?

how, yes, how

 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

west coast fire

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

a topping of ice in brook

 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

one giant step

 By not understanding

human/earth kinship, cosmos

Ponders suicide —

What hotline can be called —who

will talk us down from the edge

this, this is what we are

 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.

every now and then

Unnaming love

Finds home

Wherever it steps

to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with

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

nor beginning

 Someday we will be

Released from constricting thought

Revealing no end

essence without names

Watched Interstellar again after many years.

Dimensions beyond understanding. Love as force beyond gravity, direction, or choice.

One who gives rise to the awakened mind
should know that
what is called a self or person,
a living being or a life span,
is not so in essence,
but only in concept.
Names like self, person, living being, or life span
are names only.
Subhuti, you should know
that all things of the world
are like this,
and you should have confidence
in their essence without names.

Diamond Sutra

To know that you dwell in unimaginable consciousness enfolding space, time, and thought -- where all that is or ever has been or will be -- is now and here and internal existence with no external verification, no decomposition of life force.

When we awake we will remember everything.

Un-naming with love.

but the truth is holy

Ending of The View from the Bridge, A Play in Two Acts, 1955, by Arthur Miller:

Alfieri, who is in the crowd, turns out to the audience. The lights have
gone down, leaving him in a glow, while behind him the dull prayers of
the people and the keening of the women continue. 

 

Alfieri Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it

better. But the truth is holy, and even as I know how wrong he

was, and his death useless, I tremble, for I confess that something

perversely pure calls to me from his memory – not purely good,

but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly

known and for that I think I will love him more than all my

sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be!

And so I mourn him – I admit it – with a certain . . . alarm. 

 

Curtain. 

 It feels the final monologue, the final line, could be epitaph for Donald Trump.

We note the "himself purely" and we note the mourning him (hymn?) with "a certain . . . alarm."

It occurs to me that many will shake their heads, as if attempting to rouse themselves from a spell or trance, and wonder how they were so captivated by the man. 

Flaws flagrant, character fragmented, steely adhaerence to misalliance, inability to feel, commiserate or bond with another outside of transaction or diminishing putdown.

Like Eddie in the play he remains unaware of himself and oblivious to insight.

I'd say it is sad, but it is more infuriating that such a man could be used and encouraged by so many people surrounding him (for their own benefit) and by so many voting Americans (for their own cynicism.)

However much longer he might continue to remain on his feet and walk, he is already dead, having been killed by his own obtuse desire to "show them" how he wanted to be respected and brought in to the elite paradigm of being the best, the greatest, the undefeatable, the most charming, most sexy, wealthiest and singularly the most indefatigable big shot that ever lived.

We will grow alarmed that we mourn his passing.

it’s only words, but words are all i have

 All the way on mountain trail

Om mani Padme hum

Behold what is within without

es gibt keinen anderen *

The president-to-be is now a fully convicted felon. (At least until his conviction is possibly overturned by the Supreme Court.)

In prison today, there was uncertainty as to whether anything fair was taking place with regard to the way the very rich, extremely powerful, and decidedly higher-ups are treated.

We didn't spend much time on such a difficult and obnoxious question.

Instead there was a consideration that language began to come to be when God said "I am not alone."

There is considerable conversation as to whether there is only inner reality and that the notion of "outside" or "other" has something to do with where love goes to die.

The prospect that love is the expansion of inner source, emerging and manifesting itself in an expanding emergence of encompassing wholeness, where all is inclusion and there is no other, draws furrowed brow consideration that wants to designate the proponent of such a notion as loopy and loony. Which is a safe designation in the group.

When we are in love, there is no out love.

Everyone is contemplating

 Isaiah's 45:5 wording in the New International Version:

I am the LORD, and there is no other *

Or 

1 Kings 8:60

...so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God. There is no other! 

It wasn't just the sentencing today that befuddled our circle, it was this notion that "there is no other." 

We spoke about the blind men encountering and identifying the elephant. We spoke about Waiting for Godot.  We spoke about the Native American woman seeing the journey of those who've passed over. We talked about doing a college independent study on physics and spirituality. We spoke about ancient civilizations and signs of advanced technology. We talked about philology and the necessity of continual hermeneutics. We sat in silence at beginning. We enjoyed one another's company.

Is there a benefit in exploring further the notion that there is no other?

Not unlike the internal combustion engine, for love to rehabilitate existence it has to be an internal comportment rearrangement

It would be as though Logos-Energy, coming to word, inspired facing one another, nodding yes, and yes, and yes.

one thing left

 Even when there is 

nothing to be done 

we can feel

something is wrong

Fire in LA

Felon in NY

So many ways

We are crippled

do you see anything coming

The delight of reading Waiting for Godot again. The cadence lines by Samual Becket. The haunting play of it.

VLADIMIR:

Where were you? I thought you were gone for ever.

ESTRAGON:

They're coming!

VLADIMIR:

Who ?

ESTRAGON:

I don't know.

VLADIMIR:

How many?

ESTRAGON:

I don't know.

VLADIMIR:

(triumphantly). It's Godot! At last! Gogo! It's Godot! We're saved! Let's go and meet him! (He drags Estragon towards the wings. Estragon resists, pulls himself free, exit right.) Gogo! Come back! (Vladimir runs to extreme left, scans the horizon. Enter Estragon right, he hastens towards Vladimir, falls into his arms.) There you are again again!

ESTRAGON:

I'm in hell!

VLADIMIR:

Where were you?

ESTRAGON:

They're coming there too!

VLADIMIR:

We're surrounded! (Estragon makes a rush towards back.) Imbecile! There's no way out there. (He takes Estragon by the arm and drags him towards front. Gesture towards front.) There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go! Quick! (He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.) You won't? (He contemplates auditorium.) Well I can understand that. Wait till I see. (He reflects.) Your only hope left is to disappear.

ESTRAGON:

Where?

VLADIMIR:

Behind the tree. (Estragon hesitates.) Quick! Behind the tree. (Estragon goes and crouches behind the tree, realizes he is not hidden, comes out from behind the tree.) Decidedly this tree will not have been the slightest use to us.

ESTRAGON:

(calmer). I lost my head. Forgive me. It won't happen again. Tell me what to do.  

VLADIMIR:

There's nothing to do.

ESTRAGON:

You go and stand there. (He draws Vladimir to extreme right and places him with his back to the stage.) There, don't move, and watch out. (Vladimir scans horizon, screening his eyes with his hand. Estragon runs and takes up same position extreme left. They turn their heads and look at each other.) Back to back like in the good old days. (They continue to look at each other for a moment, then resume their watch. Long silence.) Do you see anything coming?

VLADIMIR:

(turning his head). What?  

ESTRAGON:

(louder). Do you see anything coming?  

VLADIMIR:

No.

ESTRAGON:

Nor I.

They resume their watch. Silence. 

 

(--from Waiting for Godot, by Samual Beckett  

 

We do seem to be waiting.

Why for, who for, perplexes. 

They are waiting together.

They cannot leave.

We are inclined not to leave.

But wait.

vita interior, hoc, est, enim, corpus meum

The outer world is killing education and learning, thinking and the amble of wisdom.

Vita interior, hoc, est, enim, corpus meum

(The inner life, for this, is, my body.)

extra interiorem nulla salus

There is no salvation outside the inner world.

(Hoc ego sedeo, aliud facere non possum. Here I sit, I cannot do other.)

without explanation tell me about god

I heard from God today

There was no sound but breath after breath

Not a single reason for words

a crane flying from its cage

Mythology is our visible, albeit partially fantastical, access to the invisible imaginative world.  

The stories we tell are enough to shake our sanity and befuddle our prayer life.

If you return to the Truth,

To the emptiness of delusion,

You’ll know that Buddha and people

Are not different.

Delusion is a butterfly

Plunging into the fire,

Enlightenment, a crane flying

From its cage.

Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615) dialyzen

Truth will become rare commodity in the United States beginning 20 January. Bluster, puffery, and absurd dominance prevaricating as pompous buffoonery will reign. It will test sanity and threaten ability to not become insanely reactive. In other words, we are expected to submit in squeamish grovel under the dictates of the Prime Felon's Megaphonic Announcements.

There's something to be said for returning to truth. Lies are a weak floorboard to stand on. Collapse and painful falling are the consequences of false persona and fictitious glower.

When the crane flaps its wings into open landscape, we take notice -- there is a way out.

a poem turns its reader into accomplice

Get out of my poem!

    Excuse me?

Get out of my poem!

    I’m not in your poem.

Yes you are, I can feel your fingerprints, I can sense your eyes. Get out!

    I don’t know what you are talking about,

Yes you do. Get out of my poem!

Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved; if, of course, it is murder, or poetry, at all.   

(in novel, Thirteen Ways of Looking, by Colum McCann)

    I was just walking by.

No, you looked in.

    I didn't see anything.

That's not the point. You looked over at the poem being written.

    [silence]

Admit it!

    [silence]

You owe me. 

    [silence]

You owe me

    I'll never tell.

...   ...   ...

Another piece of evidence:

Four Thousand Days and Nights 

            by Tamura Ryuichi 

For one poem to be born

we must kill

We must kill many things

We shoot, assassinate, poison the many things we love 

 

Look

We shot

the silence of four thousand nights and the glare of

    four thousand days

simply because we wanted the trembling tongue of one small bird

from the sky of four thousand days and nights 

 

Listen

We assassinated

the love of four thousand days and the pity of four thousand nights

simply because we needed the tears of one hungry child

from all the rainy cities and blast furnaces

and the midsummer wharves and the coal mines 

 

Remember

We see things our eyes cannot see

We hear things our ears cannot hear

We poisoned

the power of imagination of four thousand nights

    and the cold memories of four thousand days

simply because we wanted the fear of one stray dog 

 

To give birth to one poem

we must kill the things we love

This is the only road to take to resurrect the dead

This is the road we have to take  

 

Translation by Samuel Grolmes and Tsumura Yumiko

If they question you, admit nothing.

Be wary of becoming accomplice to either murder or poetry.