Notes From A Burning House

My writer’s muse only works part-time, due to my budget constraints.  Lately, the muse has been leaving me little memos on the kitchen table.  One recent note read, simply, "If these walls could talk." 

This has led to meditations on the objects I come into contact with every day: the car, the meditation cushion, the coffee press, and so on.  What if an oracle could get into a state of one-mind and allow these objects to ’speak’ through them?  This led to some silly monologues, and one or two interesting ones; and it leads to further thoughts about how we sometimes endow objects with a personality.  It’s created by thinking and imagination, of course, but what an interesting activity. 

Like my beloved brown suede cap (which I’m wearing in the photo on the right). 

If this hat were a man, it would be an old tattooed character holding court at the quiet end of a small bar, one of those bars built inside a cheap steel and aluminum building with no windows and a sign on the door reading “Brothers of Lithuania Social Club” or something like that, where the newest single on the jukebox is by Billy Ocean and the felt on the pool table is so torn that a game of billiards (for 75 cents) is something more like miniature golf. You can still drink Black Label for one dollar, if you don’t mind it’s a little warm because something’s wrong with the pump, and no one goes in there who doesn’t know everybody because it isn’t a place for meeting new people and marketing your personality, it’s a place for drinking alcohol with one eye on the game on the TV set bolted to the wall. If you’re not sitting at the bar you are sitting in one of their fiery orange plastic chairs they’ve had since they fixed the place up a little in 1981. There isn’t trouble there very often, and if there is, old Brown Hat quells it fast. He is a not peacemaker, but he is a peace keeper. He hardly ever has to break up a fight because people have heard that you never actually see Brown Hat make a fist or swing his arm – you just suddenly have a bloody nose and ache all over and can’t move your left leg. Thanks to this reputation, old Brown Hat can cool a fight with little more than a look. His position has not been challenged by younger men, because younger men don’t often come here, owing to the lack of young women. Old Brown Hat doesn’t know any jokes but he’ll laugh at any joke as long as it’s dirty. At home he listens to the classical music station and he recognizes Brahms and likes him, but nobody here will ever know that about the old BH. Old Brown Hat was a little too young to serve in WWII, but he was in the Navy in the 1950’s and had his heart broken by a Subic Bay beauty he wanted to marry, but she crushed him. He later married a hometown girl who is no longer with us, yet every day of his life his thoughts have turned to Luzon and Grande Island and his almond-eyed first love, and it takes a little effort to put his mind on something else, but he winces imperceptibly and carries on.

That’s what this hat is like.

Lately I am making an effort to speak loudly and clearly into the telephone, and also into the place settings, the plants, ball point pens (you never know), and making sure my voice carries anywhere and everywhere; I also take better care with my emails, writing in complete sentences and trying not to misuse words.  Regardless of how one feels about surveillance, when one knows that the government is taking the time to pay attention to us, we may as well show ourselves at our best by speaking well and looking sharp.

Camera are proliferating at intersections.  In Beverly Hills, they are popular enough that some neighborhood activists (Mayor Steve Webb) want to add photographic radar on residential streets.  San Jose is already doing it. Since this is the trend, along with more cameras in other public places, I try to spruce up a bit any time I take a drive.  At the very least, I shave.  Keeping the car clean and vacuumed on the inside, and putting on a nice shirt, feels better knowing one may be photographed.  If I were to try defending myself against a traffic ticket, I would hate to point to photographic evidence showing me bristly, hurtling around in a car full of receipts and coffee cups.  No, it is much better to wear a tie and have your hair combed at all times.

Yesterday’s hot news on the creeping surveillance culture was that the government was using its "data mining" of phone records to check out whom reporters were speaking to in government - a way of identifying confidential sources (i.e. whistleblowers).  The bloggers wrote indignant things, but thus far I see no evidence of mass outrage spreading like a wildfire.  Nor will there be, we can suspect, about this morning’s breaking news that the Senate has blocked any definitive ruling on the legality of the warrantless eavesdropping - looks like they are simply going to legalize it without saying it was illegal in the first place.

If I breed, my children will grow up in a world with cameras in public places checking them out as they walk on the street or drive, where law enforcement could be listening to their calls or at least noting whom they are calling, where their internet traffic and their emails might be intercepted.  I will not only beseech my children to wear clean underwear at all times in case they get into an accident; I will insist that they speak eloquently and look sharp at all times.  Drive safely, look clean, think correctly.  Someone from the government is watching.  If we bear this in mind, we will have a beautiful country.

Never could understand why I like foggy days.  Perhaps I was born to walk the harbors of Rumstick Point or Jamestown in the early morning, because as a New Englander I don’t feel like I have properly woken up without a good chill and a taste of salt on my lips.  I picture myself with a Shavian beard, fixing Johnnie Cakes with leathery hands listening to the clanging sounds of the pier.  (This is especially quaint if you know that I don’t sail and cannot swim.)

Instead, I am clean-shaven and dressed like I have a high-paying job, which I don’t; and I woke up in a lovely house in Mt. Washington that does not, in fact, belong to me.  (I am house-sitting.)  Last night I was up quite late, unable to sleep because of sounds that were nothing like a harbor: police cars, ordering people off the premises of the nearby school through loudspeakers, and more strangely, some kind of animal that was walking on the roof.

Debbie’s animal problems came to a head a couple of weeks ago, when she heard a mewing sound that sounded so insistent and vulnerable she had to put down her New Yorker and respond to the call.  She went out back and then she went out front and what she noticed was that the mewing sound got *softer* when she went outside.  Hours later, animal rescuers had cut a hole into a wall inside her house (which she has occupied for all of six months) and liberated a lone kitten.

The kitten and Debbie’s dog are not under my care, so the house is empty and quiet - just me and Debbie’s book collection, which I love exploring.  Last night I distracted myself by flipping through a medical textbook for surgeons.  Pure therapeutic schadenfreude, with a touch of moralism, nothing to be proud of, I merely report: "I may be neurotic, I may feel like a loser and fake, I may feel guilt-ridden and inadequate, behind in my bills and utterly panicked about money, but I don’t have *that* in my pancreas and for this I should be grateful.  Other people know suffering - what I am suffering now is mere inconvenience."

Then I put the book away and pulled the chain over Debbie’s bed to turn the light off, and I sat there listening to the possum or grizzly bear or jihadi terrorist (or, worse, an angry mama cat) prowling the roof of the house.

If it had been sunny and hot this morning, that might have been more than I could bear.  Thank heaven for fog.

Stephen Colbert’s blistering performance at the White House Correspondents’ dinner burst like a wildfire on the blogosphere.  When mainstream reporters gave Colbert’s satire short shrift, allegations of sour grapes (since Colbert mocked the press almost as harshly as he ripped into The Decider) followed along with accusations that they were trying to cover up Colbert’s message. 

Video here if you haven’t seen it.

The debate over Colbert’s performance was itself an interesting spectacle: a war of words on various political blogs, a realm where communication is as easy as firing off a snide e-mail and hitting Send.  Convenience, we see, does not confer quality. In this sphere of knee-jerk opinion and razor-sharp spitefulness, no one looked at the incident in much depth.  Consistently, the debated issue was whether Colbert was funny.  How is that supposed to matter?  You found it funny or you didn’t – it isn’t a test of political allegiance.  Laughing at Colbert doesn’t make you a Dean-scream liberal, and if you thought he went too far and behaved rudely, that doesn’t make you Cheney’s lapdog. 

Arguing over Colbert’s performance as if it were an ordinary comedy performance is beside the point.  Colbert was hired as an entertainer, but what he actually did was very different.  He showed up at a badminton match and proceeded to play tackle football.  It was an act of guerilla theatre, using satire to say some forbidden things and put a light on a few elephants that were in the room.  Something about his stunt has touched a nerve – yet no one examines it.

There seems to be a climate where we must look to comedians to be frank about our politics.  That just might be what Colbert was trying to tell us. 

Wednesdays are the Zen Center’s big night.  There are three sitting periods instead of one, and this is the night that private teaching interviews are available. On Wednesday nights, I have sometimes seen every cushion with a butt on it. That is the night we typically see some Korean faces.  When our founder was alive, the Center was very much a mix of Korean Buddhists and western Zen students.  In more recent years, those folks have gravitated toward the more traditional-style temples.

Our center in L.A. occupies a duplex house in a residential neighborhood near the Miracle Mile -  a strip of Wilshire Boulevard known for its museums, the La Brea Tar Pits and the El Rey.  Johnnie Cochran’s law offices were here, as well.

During my final days as Abbot of this Center in 2003, we began researching the house’s zoning and use permits.  The house was built in the 1920’s and for some time was owned by a Christian Science Church located next door, at the corner of Olympic Boulevard (one of the heaviest-traveled streets within the city).   They held Sunday school classes in the house for a while and thus the house had a unique housing situation: it was essentially zoned as a residence and a church at the same time.  When the Zen Center acquired the property in the early 1980’s, this unique zoning situation was very important. Besides the dual use permit which would permit the Center to operate as both church and residence, the old church permit pre-dated later mandates to provide lots of parking.  (In the second half of the last century, parking became a hot issue in L.A. Very hot.)

Among the documents we found through the zoning office was a restrictive covenant - a legal decree by the property’s first owner, that the house should never be sold to or occupied by black people or "asiatics."  It was an astonishing document to read.

The covenant cannot legally be enforced, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that was delivered this day in 1948.  The case was Shelley v. Kraemer and it declared such covenants (once common) to be unconstitutional.

Since that time, the neighborhood has changed quite a bit.  Nearly all of the homes are owned by African-American families, and our house has housed a great many "asiatics."  One might imagine the author of that covenant feeling restless in his grave.

Good.

Today: renaissance music, outdoor sex, friars, and e.e. cummings.

“We Merry Minstrels” is a madrigal group I sang with for several consecutive summers.  We would sing on Sunday afternoons on a fairway at the Theatricum Botanicum, an outdoor theatre and garden in Topanga.

We had to provide our own period costumes.  This requires some expenditure, as these costumes can be quite expensive.  Eventually I made a trip to Ventura, and paid a lot of money.  My initial idea, vetoed by the group, was to dress up as a friar.  It would have been such a delightful, subversive joke for the group to include one friar who sang songs that were sometimes bawdy.

Thomas Morley’s “Now Is The Month of Maying” is one of the most familiar examples of the English madrigal.  It’s a joyous song about screwing outdoors, a clear precursor to The Beatles’ "Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?"

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing (fa la la…)
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass. (Fa la la…)

The Spring, clad all in gladness,
Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness (fa la la…)
And to the bagpipe’s sound
The nymphs tread out their ground. (Fa la la…)

<p>

Fie then, why sit we musing,
Youth’s sweet delight refusing? (Fa la la…)
Say, dainty nymphs, and speak,
Shall we play at barley-break? (Fa la la…)

“Barley-break” is a euphemism synonymous with “a roll in the hay.” Yes, there was an old country game called ‘Barley Break’ that was played by couples and involved switching partners. It is supposed by some that one thing led to another as the wine ran down and the fireflies came out. I am sure the protagonist of this song does not have it in mind to play a simple game of tig with the dainty nymphs, and it is the thinnest pretense to suppose this song is about dancing. 

Technically, friars differed from monks in that the latter lived in cloisters whereas friars walked in the world, charged with living a life of poverty and service to the community.  (By this definition, could I be called a Zen friar?)  From the middle ages on, friars became known for corruption and avarice as well, satirized or denounced in much of the literature that survives from those times.  Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Rabelais come immediately to mind, with their images of friars selling indulgences, indulging in drink, lifting their frocks in order to love their neighbor, and so on.  (Erasmus was more concerned with hypocritical scholars and entrepreneurial clerics.)

With all that tradition behind me, why not have a friar in the choir singing of love, longing, and fate?  Alas, vetoed. 

Friars may have been judged harshly by the serious, yet Renaissance humorists found them a figure of fun, making them fools and hypocrites vulnerable to the influences of springtime.  The more secular of them even felt, as e.e. cummings would write later, “kisses are a far better fate than wisdom.”  They mocked hypocrisy and forgave harmless frailty.  Our spontaneous, erotic exuberance will out, and it disdains our vain institutions.   Moreover, it contains a certain kind of wisdom.

Oh, let’s have that whole poem:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

<p>

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

<p>

my blood approves,

and kisses are a far better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers.  Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

<p>

we are for each other; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

<p>

And death i think is no parenthesis

–e.e. cummings

<p>

From the Zen tradition, Ikkyu and WonHyo understand and nod – these are two figures who were familiar with the monastery and the brothel.

Now is the month of Maying and this blog bows in gratitude for the teaching of grammarians and madmen alike.  Now you kids go outside and play.  (Wink.)