IT CAN'T BE ME

Years ago I struck up a causal friendship with a woman I met through mutual friends. On the third or fourth time I saw her, she called her husband an idiot. I knew in that moment that she and I wouldn't go on to be friends. Her saying that and having no qualms about it was a signal to me of a very different sensibility, someone not very "evolved", someone who had little compassion. I know I was making a lot of assumptions based on that one word, but we send each other signals like that all the time.and over time I've learned to trust my instincts.
    A few weeks later, I was having a meal with our mutual friend who told me the other woman, sensing that I'd pulled away, wondered if the reason was that I was jealous because she was married. It made me laugh. Her husband did come into it, but not in the way she thought.
    This is a good example of something all of us do, sometimes repeatedly. We defend ourselves  - the problem can't be me so it must be the other -  she must be jealous or intimidated or something else.  It's always a self-serving reason, something that leaves us with  a certain superiority and allows us to walk away with no hint of being disliked and rejected.
     I notice I haven't been doing that for a good long time. I can only think it's because my confidence has grown, my ego isn't so tender. It gets easier to say, well, maybe she doesn't like me when I know that thought isn't going to crush me.  My fear of rejection used to make me interpret every look as a signal of dislike and rejection; I saw everywhere the thing I was most afraid of. But age and whatever self-knowledge I've learned on the path, as I've struggled through the events and ideas that caused deep seated pain, have helped me through the fear of rejection, the fear that I'll never be good enough, the fear that I'll never have what I want or find a way to express all I feel inside me. The fear that I'll never be a  combination of Susan Sontag and Audrey Hepburn, which I have secretly always wanted to be.  Most of the time the camera in the ceiling which was always judging me, the self-consciousness that came from all that fear - most of time it's gone. I can stay in the moment and go through the day without constantly assessing what the world thinks of me. I can just be who I am with all my faults and mistakes and lack of self-discipline. I'm no longer the victim of my deeply threatened ego and if someone doesn't like me  I remind myself of all the times I was the one who walked away. It's the way of the world. It's what it means to be human.
   

SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, etal.

I've been reading a book called At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It's about the philosophers Sartre, Beauvoir and their circle during and after WWII - their lives, existentialist philosophy and more than a few affairs.
     Here's a long quote by Bakewell:

Freedom for (Sartre) lay at the heart of all human experience...as a human being I have no predefinednature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course, I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

   Sartre put this principle into a slogan: Existence precedes essence....roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on the create my own definition (or nature, or essence)...you might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that it is the human condition from the moment of first-consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom, no more, no less.

   I, Sherry, can see that if I alone create myself from what I do, I have a responsibility to act in such a way that I will want to be the person I'm always becoming. My actions will reveal who I am. No philosophy or religion or politics or other person can tell me what to do; I am the only one who can make my choices.

     What a responsibility! I can already feel anxiety. Will I make the right or the wrong choice? I think Sartre would say there is no right or wrong. There is only what we do which will lead to the next action and the next. 

     So Buddhist, so 21st century. Bakewell thinks it could be that existentialism will make a comeback. It seems to me that its ideas are already here.

     More about responsibility another time.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Very often, I find myself thinking about the fact that everything we think and see and do depends on how we look at things, and how we look at things grows out of ideas we've absorbed from our culture, our temperament, how we were raised and what our experience has been. We use those things to determine truth, which is filtered and measured against all that we already are. This is why two people can look at the same thing and come to opposite conclusions about it. In a sense, we are only our opinions. None of us has access to Truth with a capital T.

     One more time, I wonder how any of us understand each other and why we don't get into more trouble because of misunderstanding. Well, we do get into a fair amount of it. There are many religions in the world with their individual perspectives and we all know the devastation the clash of these perspectives, these opinions produce. People find a perspective, often a received perspective, and cling to it because it's so much easier than having to figure out the world on your own. People need to be sure they have the right perspective and will sometimes go to any length to defend it and make other people believe it.

     There is often a clash of perspective between two people. Most of us don't like to be challenged - we get defensive or dig ourselves in even more. Sometimes, there simply is no way across the gulf of clashing opinions. But usually, unless we're rigidly stuck in our egos, we can talk through our differences and reach some kind of understanding.

     But even though the fact that we make our own truths leads to many of the world's most intractable problems, it also means that we can arrive at new truths. We can look at things from a new perspective. We can learn. We can change our minds. For years, the fight for civil rights, womens rights and gay rights existed on the edges of our culture. But little by little, those movements grew until a majority of people found a new perspective. They changed their minds. 

     It seems ridiculous to point out that we can change our minds, that we can grow. But in the most profound sense, it's our glory. It's what enables us to transcend our fears and doubts. It's what enables us to expand our consciousness.     

     

INTENSITY

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again, forever -- Goethe

     When I first read this, I was floored. Goethe was one of a handful of exceptional men in his time, amazingly productive, full of accomplishment. Not only a great writer, he did pioneering work in color theory and anatomy, designed gardens, ran a theatre and served as a councilor to the head of a German court. He traveled, wrote 10,000 letters and had a calendar that was always full.  
     He was restless, possibly driven and I wonder if that's how he dealt with the dissatisfaction he must have felt at bottom. I see him whirling through his days, busy, curious about the world around him, social, but when he is alone depression - anxiety - emptiness - move out of the background he can mask through his busy days, and come to the fore, as if they are the default in his consciousness. I wonder if he would have traded his accomplishments for a life of well-being. I think not. He was part of a Romantic generation that saw poetry in suffering and he might have sensed how much his angst and restlessness led him to make his world as big as possible.
     It's the push and pull between a life of inner peace and a life of public accomplishments. It's our idea of the tormented artist who suffers for his art, or our suspicion that creativity needs the irritating grain of sand in order to make pearls. It's hard to picture a peaceful person doing much more than contemplating whatever has caught her eye.  
     I suppose I, too, am Romantic with a capital R. I value my restless mind, my curiosity. They keep me from getting bored. Passion and obsession get me going, make all the lights brighter so I can see more intensely. Words, images often come in a barrage and I feel that I'm on a taut string, vibrating with ideas. It's not peaceful but it's often productive. The question is, is it worth it?
     I've spent a long time cultivating inner peace and yet there is a part of me that hates that phrase. Not only because it's become a main stream cliche but also because a part of me can't imagine anything duller. I know a spiritual person would tell me how I'm misunderstanding. In fact, I can tell myself: inner equilibrium in no way has to block intensity and creativity. It can do the opposite - unblock all the feelings buried inside. But I want the Sturm und Drang, the thunder and lightening, the yearning for something I can't even see much less have. Intensity, intensity, as long as I'm alive.

ARNOLD BERNSTEIN

I love vintage steamship paper items from the 1920s and 30s - brochures and booklets, deck plans, passenger lists, menus, luggage labels and tags. They often have wonderful graphics, deco ship images a la Cassandre, the great French graphic artist, with strong clean lines, blocks of color, everything crisp and clean. I can't say why I'm so drawn to these particular pieces of paper; it's one of those mysteries of aesthetics, why we respond to one thing and not another, but there are times I think the "hit" I get from them, the aesthetic pleasure, is as sharp and deep as that from a great painting. 

     A couple of years ago I came across a brochure with a typed letter from the Arnold Bernstein Shipping Company whose ships sailed between Europe and the United States. The company's headquarters were in Berlin and the letter is dated 1934. I looked at the date and I looked at the name and knew instantly what probably had happened to a man named Bernstein in that time and place. I shivered as I put them carefully away and, from time to time, when I'm looking for something else, I come across them and stop for a long silent moment before I rush on to something else.

     Then, last weekend, as I was going through a stack of vintage luggage labels at a paper show, I came across a little trove of Arnold Bernstein Shipping Company ephemera - six different luggage labels and tags. There's a big one that could be marked "Wanted" or "Not Wanted" to identify which bags were to go to the passengers' stateroom and which to be held in the hold for the duration of the voyage. There is one for Plymouth and another for Antwerp, tagging which bags were to go ashore at which port. Two more are for a sailing from New York to Le Havre and New York to Plymouth. Amazingly, they're all unused and in very good condition.

     This morning, as I was putting them away with the letter and brochure, the papers in my hand were suddenly sacred relics, ritual objects that led me through the abstractions of history and into the real life at its heart. I saw Arnold Bernstein, the man. He was obviously prosperous and I imagined him in one of those huge Berlin apartments I've seen in the movies, with polished wood floors and beautiful carpets, paintings in gold frames on the wall, heavy drapes and dark wood furniture, fine china and silverware - all of it the essence of gemultlichkeit, welcoming, warm, inviting. He's at the dinner table raising a glass of red wine, surrounded by family and friends. It's an ordinary scene, almost trite, and that's the point. There's no hint at all of what is soon to come.

     I felt Arnold coming back to life, and he was suddenly very close, this man I knew almost nothing about. I wasn't thinking about his probable end. The man I wanted to touch was active, productive, deeply enmeshed in a thriving world. I found myself wishing, really wishing that he could know I was thinking about him. I want him to know that something of him survives, that across the years and distance, I have found this record of his existence: I have found him. I feel his heart beating, as if I'd placed my hand on his chest. It's not too much to say I feel love. 

     After I put my Arnold Bernstein archive away, I sat for a while thinking about our human capacity for empathy, this ability we have to feel another person's humanity across time and space, even without knowing them. In fact, it's one of our greatest gifts, that as sealed off as we usually are in our private egos and consciousness, from time to time, we crack open and a deep reservoir of feeling flows out of us, connects us with another, and loops back to enrich and expand us.  If I want more of that enrichment and expansion, I can remind myself to reach out to the many people that cross my path every day, to be kind, generous and tolerant, to see fully the person standing in front of me. But, sometimes, I don't have to remind myself. A deep empathetic connection arises spontaneously and carries me out of myself and into the world. Those are the golden moments for me, when all the barriers to another are gone and all I feel is love.

      

    

INTERPRETATION

The other day I made a plan with a friend to go to a movie. I can't remember exactly what we said, but he went to the theatre and I went to his place. There he is standing in front of the theater, eventually fuming and finally going in. Here I am, instantly understanding the miscommunication, leaping in my car and of course too late for the beginning of the show. I went inside anyway and afterwards we met up in the lobby. 
     This kind of misunderstanding has happened more than once. It isn't due to not hearing right; it's because two people, hearing the same thing, can have two different interpretations of what was actually said. Sometimes I think it's a miracle that we understand one another as well as we do.
     Here's something related: when I say "chair" I don't have to actually visualize a chair because the concept of "chair" is so embedded in my mind. If pressed, I come with the image of kitchen chair, painted white. I don't know why that's my particular archetype of "chair" but that image has put down tracks in my brain and probably will never disappear.
      When you say "chair," chances are your archetypal chair is different than mine. If pressed you may see a plush down chair, a pool chair, or one designed by Gustav Stickley. Who can why you have that connotation? But no matter what I see and you see, we both have the general concept of chair and can understand each other.
     We each have our own private interpretations, filtered through our own consciousness.  We interpret everything that comes to our senses as symbols; everything is filtered through our own consciousness. I can't touch a "word" but if I see w-o-r-d, I know what it symbolizes. The same is true of everything in our world. We understand it in accordance with our assumptions and opinions, the received knowledge of our culture, our own experience and temperament and all the resonances and connotations we've formed in the course of our lives. All of that gives a sense of internal continuity; it's everything we mean when we say "I."
    This may sound abstract but in fact it's the most stunning aspect of human consciousness.The world we receive isn't set in stone; it's what we make of it. Because it is we who invest the world with meaning we can over time change those meaning. We are free to revise opinions, gain new insight, come to a new perspective. We can change our minds.  We can imagine more than one reality, and form an opinion of our choices.  We understand the power of "should" and how it's at the heart of what we call our conscience.  We can give ourselves over to certain abstract symbols in which we invest the deepest meaning, ideas like honor and morality and sometimes we're prepared to give our lives for them. 
     This is how it is for all of us, and it's how it is for me. No matter how far down the trail of depression I go, or how much self-loathing I latch onto in any given day, I know I have the possibility of turning that reality into a completely different one. Experience has taught me if I find a way to turn my focus just the slightest bit the world will look very different, filled with new possibilities. No matter what my circumstances or how difficult the outside world is or how mired I am in all the things I'm often mired in, I can find a new perspective. Just knowing that is comforting. And even more - it's the ultimate freedom.

EPHEMERA

For a long time now, I've earned my crust of bread buying and selling thing which can be classified as emphemera - Vnctorian valentines, a 1920s oil company road map of Florida, a 1910 booklet of views of Los Angeles, a house plan catalog of 1950s ranch houses, a book of alphabets meant to be a reference for sign painters at the turn of the 20^th century, a circa 1900 catalog of chisels, hammers and rules.  Anything made of paper, including historical and vernacular photographs. By this time, other dealers know my specialization so it wasn’t unusual to get a call from a jewelry dealer in Palm Springs who had just bought from an old woman who said she had paper. It’s a long drive from Los Angeles, but the need for new stock is always pressing, and  I want the jewelry dealer to call me again if she comes across anything for me. I say yes without hesitation.

     Actually, I don’t mind the long drive. Being in the car, footloose at 70 miles an hour in the gorgeousness of Southern California, on the hunt for the big score (say, a Civil War photo album, with every soldier identified by name, rank and company, even better if they are Confederate rather than Union; this is an impossible dream) – it’s just about the best part of what I do. And there are antique malls and shops along the way – in towns with names that mean the West to me - Loma Linda, Yucaipa, Beaumont (“City of Antiques") and Banning. I stop at a few and find some things – an unusually nice tintype, a children’s picture book, a 1948 Renie street guide of Los Angeles. Not a bad haul.

     In Palm Springs, I have no trouble finding the house. It’s a 1950s ranch, shaded by an overhanging pepper tree, the kind of house I'm sure the next owners will update, introduce retro lines to give it the Palm Springs modernism look and, even though it’s on the far side of town, sell for twice what they paid for it.  I ring the bell and wait a few moments.  The door is opened by a woman who startles me; she’s thin and bloodless, so pale, I think immediately of a vampire visiting her nightly to feed. Small and delicate, about seventy and spry, with a very creased face, she’s wearing black tights, a flowing pink shirt and a wild paisley turban piled up high on her head.  I can’t see her hair but I wouldn’t be surprised if it falls down her back. She turns and I follow her in.  She has impossibly thin legs – for some reason, I think she may have been a dancer.  

     I’ve assumed she’s Mrs. Johnson, the woman who says she has paper.  But in fact, Mrs. Johnson is in the living room, a large old woman in a recliner, oxygen hose to her nose. She’s sitting still but I can feel the energy coming from her, the anxiety and irritability of someone in constant pain. I don’t need to be told she’s very close to death.  

     She waves me to a chair and I sit.  There are no introductions. For a moment, no one speaks and all I hear is the sound of the air conditioning and the oxygen machine.  I notice brown streaks on the wall behind her.  They must be paint but they look like feces; slowly it comes to me that there must have been something hung on the walls – mirrored tiles, a mural? – and what I now see is the glue residue. The carpeting is wall to wall and it's exactly the color of Astroturf. Artificial flowers are stuffed into huge vases; porcelain angels are every where.

     I've had a long drive and ask to go the bathroom.  The thin one looks confused, then leads me to a tiny room off the kitchen. It’s crammed with so many cartons I can hardly turn around. But when I do, I see the toilet – there's an old and rusted potty chair placed over it, the seat about six inches higher than the actual toilet.  I’m uncertain what to do but it doesn’t matter; when I try to lift it, it can’t be removed.  It’s dirty, as is the toilet beneath it.  I’ve been in so many houses and shops where people have apologized for the bathroom, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like this. Still, I’ve been in the car a long time and I have no choice. I’m not sure my urine will go into the bowl, but it does. 

     Back in the living room, no one makes any move to show me any paper.  The thin one brings out her costume jewelry to see if I want to buy it.  She’s holding out a big straw basket filled with dime store necklaces and pins and when I say it isn’t my sort of thing, she shrugs and disappears down the hall to the bedrooms. Mrs. Johnson doesn’t speak until the thin one returns, hopping as she pulls on slacks, struggling to get them over the tights.  It’s 105 out and she’s says she’s going to the market; maybe her thinness, the pale bloodlessness, makes her constantly cold.  Mrs. Johnson writes out a check for her. I’m still trying to figure out their relationship – friends, caretaker and patient, roommates? Mrs. Johnson tells me she’s already sold the house and is moving to a nursing home in Missouri to be near her son. The thin one, who hasn't left yet, says she’s staying in Palm Springs, that she’ll miss Mrs. Johnson because they’ve been together for many years. Mrs. Johnson doesn’t hear her, or ignores her, and I can see the thin one wants some kind of acknowledgement she doesn’t get, probably never gets. She jumps up and says she’s going to the kitchen and Mrs. Johnson asks for some of her chocolate stuff. This turns out to be a small can of Ensure.The thin one can’t read the label (where are her glasses?) and holds it out but Mrs. Johnson can’t read it either. I’m halfway out of my chair to help but she finally focuses.Yes, it’s the chocolate. The thin one picks up the check and leaves with no goodbye.

     The oxygen pump and the air conditioner drone on.  Mrs. Johnson says something about the move and her son, but she’s interrupted when a third woman comes through the front door.  She’s about fifty, with blond permed hair, a cotton shirt, shorts and tennis shoes.  Again, no introductions so I have no idea what her relationship to Mrs. Johnson is.  But when she’s told I’m the woman who drove down from LA, she goes to a bedroom in the back and brings back a wide dresser drawer; she says its the paper I’m supposed to look at. She puts it on the dining table (surrounded by three cabinets with china dishes neatly stacked and a whole new raft of angels). There are a couple of old Life magazines, a few snapshots, an old dance journal in very bad condition, some greeting cards from the Sixties and a few other uninteresting, which is to say, unsaleable things.  I’m very disappointed – it’s nowhere near enough to justify a two-hour ride.  Nonetheless, I offer $30 for the little I’m willing to take. I won’t lose money but I’m not sure I’ll make anything at all.  When I say goodbye, Mrs. Johnson flutters a wave; she’s still anxious and irritated, and I don’t want to think about what she has on her mind.

     In the car, I drive down the main drag in town. It’s so hot I don’t want to get out of the car, even to look through the antique shops I see. Anyway, this is Palm Springs – they’ll all have mid-century furniture with no paper at all.  

     On my way out of town, I drive up toward the mountain where the pricey houses are. Under the relentless sun, the streets seem lonely but cramped and crowded at the same time.  There’s new wood and glass and stucco, new yuccas and aloes and grasses wherever I look. I know if I drive around long enough, I'll find something of architectural distinction - but not today. Right now, this minute, I want to go home.  

     Months later, I come across one of the photos I bought from Mrs. Johnson. It's a black and white snapshot typical of so many I come across – a group of people at the beach, smiling at the camera.  I’m sure at one time there were many other photos, a whole album of them – the children, the pets, the new car, the trip to the lake. I can feel the emotion behind all these family photos – the pride of the parent snapping the baby in the cradle, the delight of catching the dog curled up with the cat, the attention paid to countless anonymous people posed in a driveway or against a bush in the backyard. Those moments are ephemeral, captured in a photo which will also become ephemeral, destined to wind up in the hands of someone who has no idea who or where the people are, the hands of a stranger.  

     I wonder about Mrs. Johnson and the thin one, where they are, and if they’re both alive. And I think about myself, about where I’ll be when I’m Mrs. Johnson’s age and who will be with me. I shudder at the thought that I may be alone. But after a moment, my mind moves on and I remember the mountains behind the houses in Palm Springs and the hills I skirted on the way to the freeway, rock and dirt a dusty gold in the summer light. They're a glimpse of the opposite of ephemeral; they will be here long after I and everyone I know is gone. Unexpectedly, I'm comforted. I'm connected to the natural order, and in the instant of that connection everything in me surges, expands, and before I even put it into words, I know the possibility of this connection and expansion is always with me, no matter what happens or doesn't happen in my life. I carry with me the memory of what connection feels like, and that memory, ephemeral, ungraspable, feels as solid as the golden hills. It's solid ground for me to stand on. I take a breath and  as I go back to whatever it is I'm doing, I know everything will be all right. 

INSIGNIFICANT/IMPORTANT

Many years ago, there was an initiative on the California ballot against nuclear weapons. No one thought it would have any effect, but it would put the state of California on record as being against the bomb. I hadn't paid much attention to the effort so I was surprised when one night I began thinking about the issue. What could be more important than trying to rid the world of weapons that could destroy the world? And with that question, I realized I should do something to get the initiative passed.
    I've never liked working with committees or groups. It drives me crazy when everyone talks at once or can't stay on the subject, not listening but wanting to be heard. Those kinds of groups rarely run a tight ship and I'm a tight ship person. This may mean that I'm controlling and want things to go as I say they should go. Well, there's more than enough evidence to make me confess that "may" isn't quite appropriate. 
     Nonetheless, I thought I should join the campaign. When I asked, what could be important, I felt a kind of moral evaluation taking place in my consciousness. If I really felt that few things took precedence over banning the bombs, how could I live with myself if I did nothing? Did I want to be passive and oblivious? As soon as I thought about it, I realized I'd be moving forward with the underlying sense that I had disappointed myself, chosen to be passive and oblivious, retreated into the familiar shadows which confirmed the worst judgments I made on myself. If I wanted to move into the future without this particular piece of baggage (there was always more inside to deal with), if I wanted to add to, or at least not take away from my very shaky self-esteem, it was clear what I should do. So, even though I knew my efforts wouldn't have any real effect, I found a group and gave some nights to stuffing envelopes and pasting address labels on them. I can't remember now how many nights I did that but I think I must have intuitively known how many were enough to satisfy that "I should do something." 
     I'm fascinated by that "should." We seem to be born with a moral sense. We know, if only unconsciously, what we think we should do, and if the gulf between should and what we actually do is too great, we know it. Those of us who aren't sociopaths may feel guilt which we can end by taking responsibility. We may spend needed energy on efforts of rationalization. We may simply know the particular feeling of letting ourselves down. We may just feel bad.
     If you want to know more about our moral imperatives, our ethics, you may as well start with Plato and Aristotle because there hasn't been a philosophy or religion or spiritual tradition that doesn't have ideas about right and wrong. It's one of the universal questions we ask ourselves. How do we decide what is right or wrong? How do we justify the choices we make? If you want to know more, vast, vast libraries will be happy to provide fodder for pondering for years to come.
     I did some work for the ban the bomb initiative even though I knew my actions, and the actions of many others, would have little effect. Gandhi said, "What you do may be insignificant but it is very important that you do it." Live up to your higher nature. Act free of expectations; do not pin your actions on the end result. We have no control over how the world receives our efforts. So do what enlarges you here and now and the rest will take care of itself.
     

DYLAN'S COHORT, AND MINE

Statisticians and demographers often use the term “cohort,” to mean a group of individuals who share a common characteristic. It can be economic level, years of education or just about anything else that can be measured. By the measurement of age, Bob Dylan and I are in the same cohort.  I’m a couple of years younger but the Age of Dylan is my age as well.

When I heard that he’s won the Nobel Prize, I realized that for a while now, what I mean by “Dylan” has undergone a change. For years, I meant the Dylan of the beginning, when we were young, and he caught the perfect wave of those early Sixties changing times. Music burrows into us, sets up its banners and tents, a permanent encampment, and stirs us in a way no other art form can.  For someone like me, a fan who never became a fanatic, those songs mean something more than “Dylan.” They’re my own personal worm hole  – just a few opening chords and I’m back in the time of my time, all youth and optimism, when, Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven! Time has shown we were naïve about how easy it would be to change the world, but it’s also shown that we were right – about civil rights, being against the war, all war, and the values of what came to be called the counter-culture. The authenticity of our ideals is still there in the authenticity of the songs.

But beginning about ten years ago, around the time our cohort was more or less on the line of sixty-five, another “Dylan” began to take shape. That year, I found myself buying Modern Times, the first album of his in years that I actually paid money for. I wanted it because it was evidence that after all these years, with a lifetime of all kinds of experience, Dylan is still the real deal. He’s still at it, fifty years later committed to doing the work he was meant to do with the energy to keep turning out some of his best songs. I’m continually surprised by how much that means to me. But that’s the Dylan I’ve come to love, the one who has stayed righteous and true, the one who is still going strong.

 Dylan has always hated strangers assuming they know who he is; he hates being a symbol for anything or anyone. But he must know it’s unavoidable. I’ll use another word. Representative. Dylan is a representative of our cohort, our generation. He represents our tribe, and more than represents; he’s completely embedded in our own thinking about ourselves. That must be why, when I heard about the Prize, I felt as if we’d all won it, felt it as an acknowledgement and validation of our own particular Age, of who we were at the beginning, what we’ve been through, and who we are now.  

For years, Dylan has been on the Never Ending Tour, playing for thousands of people, hiding in plain sight. He’s the Lone Ranger, drifting into town to do some good and gone before you know it and you’ve never even seen his face. Of course, the Tour eventually will end, as will all our own private tours. That fact is always there, a slow train moving closer as it ambles down the track. Well, even though it’s getting there, it isn’t dark yet. There’s still energy to do work, make connections and find our own meaningful metaphors. There’s time to give and feel love. Time to keep going strong. Of course, there’s only one wish for us in that time. May we stay forever young.

MOBY DICK;: OBSESSION

"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' bed, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way."    -- Herman Melville, MOBY DICK. 

This is from one of Ahab's extraordinary soliloquies, extraordinary not only because it's Shakespearean in quality but because it reveals Ahab's insight into him-self. In a sense, he's doubly cursed - with the misery of his obsession with the white whale and also with his utter clarity about his helplessness before it. "I am demoniac, I am madness maddened...grooved on iron rails..."  This madness will literally drown him, take down his ship, the Pequot, and all of his crew except Ishmael who alone is left to tell the tale. 
     To be in the grip of obsession is to be powerless and locked away from the world. It's to be a dog pulled on a very short leash, not only jerked forward but jerked anywhere the obsession chooses to take us. It's to be run on cold harsh iron rails that thunder through any obstacle and prevent any diversion. "Run" is more than a metaphor. In the midst of obsession, we are driven by a force that seems to come from outside and eats up our will. We completely lose ourselves. 
     There are some positive obsessions: the scientist in search of an answer, the artist driven to express something she may not even know she is trying to say. We admire these "creative" obsessions, though you hear many stories of solutions coming only after taking some kind of break - doing a crossword, going for a walk, falling asleep.  Ahab's suffering is of a whole different order. He's caught on rails he knows are leading him to destruction. 
      There may be some people who haven't felt some version of this, but I'm not one of them. I've been obsessed and I know what it feels like, the relentless need to focus over and over again on the object of obsession to the exclusion of everything else. I've felt the desperation that is part of obsession and the misery that comes from feeling powerless to get out from under its iron grip. 
     Over the years, though, I've learned a few things about how obsession works in me. I've learned what it feels like in my body - my pulse races and it's as if there's a motor revved up inside me, grinding with an intensity that tears at my chest and throat. When I remember to focus on those symptoms (which is no easy thing, by any means), I'm taking a step back, turning my attention from the object of obsession to the feelings it produces in me. That step creates distance been myself and driven thoughts of obsession. It begins a process of rediscovering my ability to choose my thoughts and focus, and to let go of an object I was so desperate to have.  
     As I've gone through the process time and time again, I've become more able to recognize when I'm beginning to get on those iron rails and how to help myself get off. But I don't think I'll ever be free of the possibility of being driven to have something I believe I absolutely need to have. I'm human and the mind wants an object to keep it busy. The miracle is that, through experience, I've learned I can watch that busy mind and work to let it go.

A TASTE OF HONEY

I sometimes find myself in an Ozymandias moment, thinking about our misguided belief that the more power we accumulate, the greater the monuments we construct, the more we will be guaranteed some kind of immortality. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" In Shelley's poem, those words are carved on a fallen pedestal, half buried in obliterating desert sands. That is the irony, that despite our boasting and pretensions, our arrogant belief that what we build will signify lasting fame, through time and the unfolding of history, everything can, and probably will, be brought low. 
     There are times, though, when the poem leads me in another direction, something quite the opposite of arrogance and futility. I think about the fact of death, that we all know we are walking toward it, and the likelihood that all we are and have and know will be covered over by those shifting sands. And even so, and nonetheless, we do build and look for the meanings of history. We project vast systems of beliefs and morality. We create art . We procreate, we cultivate compassion, we sacrifice, and above all,  we love. 
     It's that I come back to again and again - the grandeur of the human spirit, our capacity to create the deepest meanings right along side our knowledge of what's coming, to find and believe in those meanings despite our knowing that death is ahead.
     Tolstoy tells the story of a man who is being chased by a dragon. The man sees a well and jumps into it, thinking to save himself. But by the time he's already falling, he realizes there's a monster at the bottom waiting for him. He grabs at a branch growing out of the wall and hangs on to it, between the dragon above and the monster below. Soon the man notices there is a white mouse and a black mouse nibbling away at the base of the branch, and he knows that sooner or later the branch will give way and he will fall. But then he notices there is a drop of honey on one of the branch's leaves, and despite the certain fate the man knows awaits him, he reaches out to lick the honey. 
     There it is, our glory: we reach for the honey.

KRISHNA AND ARJUNA

I came across some lines from the Bhagaved Gita, the Hindu book that Gandhi loved and read throughout his life. The god Krishna appears to Arjuna, a warrior who on the eve of battle suddenly becomes reluctant to go to war. The enemy army is a clan in which Arjuna has many relatives - how can he bring himself to kill them? On the other hand, if he doesn't fight he is leaving his own army without a leader and they will killed by the enemy clan. Krishna urges Arjuna to fight but Arjuna says that will bring bad karma to his soul. Krishna says there is a way to avoid this karma. "It is not possible not to act. But it is possible to act without creating karma. One does this by performing all action without hatred or desire. Be intent on action, not the fruits of action....Action imprisons the world unless it is done as a sacrifice. Free from attachment, perform action as a sacrifice."
     This is undoubtedly one of the sections non-violent Gandhi loved, in this book that is ostensibly about going to war. Krishna is saying that you must detach from anger and hatred and not focus on whether your actions succeed or fail. Think only of the importance of acting.  "Action imprisons the world"...action that is all about success and failure, and your own needs and expectations, action that comes out of ego, can only lead to pain and suffering. Let go of attachment. Become selfless in the sense that your actions aren't attached to your ego - they're focused on a higher power and performed for a greater good. "Perform action as a sacrifice."
     Selflessness and self-sacrifice - they are among the ideals we value the most. They're universal and at the heart of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. They're as highly valued in the secular world. We admire the person who rushes into a burning building to save a child or the person who performs an act of kindness without desire for thanks or acknowledgement. We admire actions that are detached from self-interest. The first section of Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search For Meaning, is a memoir of his time in a concentration camp. He says, "The best of us did not come back." The ones who, even in that inhuman world, managed to care for others, or shared what little food they had, those who sacrificed their own survival - they are the best of us.
     In the camps, survival often depended on a person's ability to remain intact, grounded in a deep sense of self and one's humanity, which was the very thing the Nazis wanted to exterminate. This gets to another wonderful paradox: only those with a strong, secure sense of self can act selflessly and be ready to sacrifice. When you are deep in ego, when your sense of security depends on the outside world, you are too bound up in self to think of another; desires and demands, needs and expectations block out the light of compassion for the world and the desire to connect with something or someone beyond yourself.
     Finally, Krishna tells Arjuna to focus all his actions on him. In this, he is the universal god who says in many traditions and languages, "Give all your doubts, pain and suffering to me. Focus on me and you will expand yourself."