Category Archives: Ahimsa

Cutting Contest

Sekhnet took me to see the incomparable Tommy Emmanuel at Town Hall last night.   He put on his usual great show, playing with virtuosity and joy throughout.   It’s a unique experience being moved by some beautiful and complicated playing and at virtually the same instant laughing at some offhand shtick the guy does at the same time.   The man is that good.   If you ever get a chance to see Tommy live, just go see him.

It’s clear watching him play how much he loves what he is doing.  He got that good because, in addition to the talent that God gave him, he loved what he was doing enough to do it for a million hours over the decades.  His joy and sense of how much fun he’s having is infectious.   After his opening number I turned to the guy next to me, another guitarist, and said “damn, he just keeps getting better!”  My neighbor agreed.  “Like a fine wine,” he said with a satisfied smile.

It was something the guy next to me said before the show that inspires what I’m thinking about now.   We were discussing guitarists we admire and at one point I mentioned some younger blues players I’d heard for the first time in recent years, including a passionate player named Jonny Lang.   He nodded and told me I should check out the youtube of Lang and Eric Gales trading riffs.  He’d started the conversation telling me about Gales.   

“At one point the crowd is urging Gales to cut Lang, and you can see the results, I mean Lang didn’t have a chance ….”

I stopped him to say I never got the point of cutting contests.  We didn’t get a chance to pursue the subject further, because Tommy Emmanuel took the stage and that was that.

You can read about cutting contests going all the way back.  A great trumpet player came to town, there was a jam session after the show.  The local trumpet king would bring his horn and proceed to try to out-blow the star trumpet player.  It was like gunslingers, making a name for themselves by outdrawing the fastest gun in the west.   It always struck me as an idiotic misuse of talent, an ego-driven exercise in being an asshole.  Or a killer.

As a guitar player I’ve found myself in these situations a few times over the years at jam sessions.   The session is, to some guitarists, not about playing the best music we can invent, it’s about proving who is the best guitar player.  To me the best guitar player is the one who always plays exactly what you want to hear in the music.  Nice inversions of chords set perfectly against what the singer is singing.  A little bass riff that sets up what another instrument is doing.   One note, vibrating plaintively against a series of harmonies.  Sometimes it’s playing your ass off in tandem with another instrument, riffing off what the other player is doing.  I never see it as a contest and if I’m in a room where others do, it can sometimes be a long session.

A cutting contest has nothing to do with tasteful collaboration.   It’s about showing off.  It is a no holds barred competition for who is top dog.  I never understood that shit.  I know that professional musicians are often egotistical and competitive, that’s how they get to the the top of their game.  I suppose the cutting contest has some place in that world, though I’m pretty sure not everyone in that world engages in cutting contests.

But in a group of pissants renting a practice room to make some joyful noise? I mean, seriously, what the fuck?   Who is the best pissant guitarist?  Really, this is a question you think should be answered now?  Determining matters of dominance and submission instead of pursuing the highest quality musical interaction we can come up with?   

Ranking professional guitarists is dumb in any event, it’s largely a matter of taste.   Vying for supremacy with other amateur guitarists is useless at best.  You can play with virtually anyone unless they play out of tune, off time, too loud.    If you don’t like the way they play you don’t play with them anymore.  But a cutting contest among pissant guitarists?  This really how you want to waste our precious time?  Figuring out who will get to solo and who will hold down the rhythm part?

Tommy Emmanuel told a story that illuminated the issue beautifully.   His mother loved to sing and strummed a guitar and later took up lap steel guitar.   She needed an accompanist for her lap steel playing and, around the time Tommy began kindergarten, she taught him a few chords on guitar and he became her rhythm guitar player.   He couldn’t wait for school to be over so he could run home and play rhythm guitar for his mother.    His older brother Phil soon thereafter took up guitar, and he too wanted Tommy to play rhythm behind him.   He did it happily, for years.

The guitarists I love best, and I think mainly of Jimi Hendrix and Django Reinhardt in this regard, were brilliant rhythm players.  Jimi said all guitar playing is rhythm guitar playing, and it made a big impression on me.  Django could play an accompaniment like nobody’s business, hard to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you can’t play the rhythm part to one of Django’s tunes, you have no hope of playing any other part of it.

When I was learning to play two guitarists would take turns playing rhythm guitar and lead guitar.  Think of the Beatles in their early rock ‘n roll days, John banged out the rhythm part that moved the band, along with the bass and drums, and George played the cool fills and riffs and took the solos.  We’d take turns.  I became a pretty good rhythm player, and I took pride in playing a solid rhythm part.  Sometimes another player would be so inspired by the solid rhythm part I was laying down he’d solo forever, which soured the whole thing for me.

I don’t know how much of the cutting contest mentality is a result of a capitalist mindset that endlessly compares endlessly competing entities and how much is just homo sapiens nature.   We are, after all, largely powerless, and often pissed off, and trying to unsee the terror we know awaits each one of us at the end of our mortal days.  Maybe that fleeting feeling of supremacy when we step on somebody who’s a little weaker is the best we’re going to get that day.   Count me out of that shit.  I’m busy trying to complete a reasonable written accounting of myself while I’m here.

By the way, I enjoyed the clip of Jonny Lang and Eric Gales.  Gales is great.  I don’t think anybody is cutting anybody here.  They are making a joyful noise.  If you like rock and blues guitar, check ’em out (no idea what’s up with Lang’s hairdo, or Gales’ for that matter).  Here you go.

Five Minutes

(Start the clock)   Five minutes is very little time, the cosmic wink of an eye.  Five minutes is a terribly long time to hold your breath.  Five minutes of an awkward pause at an emotionally fraught impasse seems an eternity too.    In reality, five minutes is enough time to express a lot.  

The missile has been launched, is landing in now 3:44 minutes.  Now 3:33.  If I gather my thoughts for thirty seconds I can stop counting down and use my remaining time for whatever may be most important to say to whoever I am with as the universe is about to end for both of us.  Saying “2:17!” adds little to the conversation, though it’s also true.

Now I have one minute and a half left, less.  It seems a good time to point out that a loving attitude is better than a hating one, almost every time.  To remember things we love is a better way to spend these last moments than terrified of that approaching warhead.   There will be a flash in a few seconds, and the end of this beautiful world.

time.

Not that anyone asked me about God…

I have no kick against righteous practitioners of any religion, those who use religion as a way to become more empathetic, more humane, more active doing good works, more righteous.  It’s ignorant and dangerous to tar an entire religion because of the actions of violent zealots, or the smug establishment that is often religion’s double-talking political voice. 

I don’t think any less of Jesus because his American Evangelical followers were so fervent in their lockstep support of someone like Trump, as irreligious a duck as we’ve ever seen striding this earth.  It’s no reflection on Jesus or his teachings.  The rituals of my own Jewish religion leave me fairly cold, though I recognize that its teachings have provided the core of my moral awareness. 

Every religion contains contradictions.   Followers of the Prince of Peace put peaceful civilians to the sword, Allah’s name is shouted by psychos who murder innocents for some imagined higher purpose.   Religious Jews, Hindus, Jains, Taoists, Muslims, Christians in every nation embrace vicious political ideologies.  Even the Buddhists are persecuting and massacring religious minorities now, for Christ’s sake.   Truth is one, paths are many, as one guru or another once said.

At its best, religion offers fellowship, community and comfort to those who gather to pray, study the religion, do good works.  All of these things are important, the last of them essential.  I do not sneeze at any of them.   My own experiences with religious hypocrisy when I was an impressionable boy soured me on the organized religion business, but I recognize that people can be genuinely touched by their faith in God.  I don’t sneeze at it.  I don’t sneer at it.  I take each religious claim solely on the basis of its action in the world, whether it makes the person wiser and kinder, or an even greater asshole.  In the case of religious assholes, of course, few types are more insufferable than those who are always right because God told them they are. 

An old friend of mine is up against it these days.  I’ll call him Dave.  We sat down the other night for a long overdue check in.   He is overwhelmed, as so many are today.   We are supposed to be happy, optimistic, we are supposed to feel secure.  Why are we so unhappy, so fearful, so goddamned insecure in our homes, our very lives?   Religion offers a timeless explanation, so it is no mystery that people so often turn to it when times are scary.

Dave spoke at some length about some of the insights he’s getting from his study at the synagogue he attends.   He described, by way of example, the complex mystical explanation about the ten veils that keep man from seeing God.  Humans cannot see God, he explained, because of these veils, one veil veiling the next, until God, who is always present and beyond any and all veils, may appear invisible to man.  This is the reason, presumably, to study the holy books.  To be able to perceive God’s presence.

When I hear the word “God”, I immediately think of man’s greatest, and also most destructive, creation.  I consider myself, like Sekhnet, a somewhat spiritual creature, but, unlike Sekhnet, I leave God out of it.   “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”, as Johnny Beatle put it so well.  God is not dead to me, as many have suggested, but understandably driven mad by grief. 

If God is a loving deity, his heart was long ago broken by the doings of his crowning creation homo “don’t call me homo, you fucking homo” sapiens.  Either God, and/or his amanuensis, is/are, and I hesitate to sound judgmental here, fucking psychotic sometimes.   

I was at a bar mitzvah last year, reading along as the boy chanted in a beautiful voice.  I read that God had instructed the Jews to do as he had done, work six days and take the seventh day as Sabbath, a day of rest, contemplation, relaxation.  “You shall do this because I, who created you, did this.  You shall rest to remember that I rested.”

That sounded pretty good to me.  Then, as the bar mitzvah boy chanted the next line, I read: “And whosoever shall work on the Sabbath, he shall be put to death.”   Bingo.

My friend Dave has come to recognize that the good Jews of that prosperous town, with whom he studies God’s works and His unknowable plan, are largely knee-jerk Trump supporters that would make their good, civil rights championing grandmothers vomit.  This has been hard for him to reconcile with the rest of what he is learning.   It is hard for all of us to reconcile.

1945

An old friend recently told me of a film called 1945, a production making the rounds in selected cinemas.  He said he thought it was available on Nexflix, where I recently saw the 57 minute documentary.  [1]   He didn’t want to spoil it for me, but told me it’s a remarkable piece of work, as I recall he said it used  until recently unknown footage from right after the war, in the summer of 1945.  He told me it was well worth checking out.

I preface this short discussion, which I place under the category of Ahimsa, to say that as a guide to one’s own life, there is no more admirable path than non-harm.   We don’t need to kill other creatures in order to eat, we don’t need to browbeat those we disagree with, we don’t need to break heads.   There are alternatives to each of these things.   You can live well on a vegan diet.   You can mildly and directly make points in a conversation with somebody you might be tempted to browbeat.  You can usually leave the room when the temptation to break somebody’s head is about to become unbearable.    I think Ahimsa works beautifully with “what is hateful to you, don’t do to somebody else” the classical Jewish statement of the Golden Rule, formulated by Hillel.  

If you are stuck in a room, or a prison, or a camp, or a city, where violence is the rule and your survival is an open question, Ahimsa begins to seem like less of an absolute.  If you are starving to death you are as likely as not to eventually kill an animal and eat it (or have someone else kill it, butcher it, and cook it, then you can eat it).   Few fellow vegans would be self-righteous enough to fault you for it.  If someone slaughters your family, and then comes for you, a Gandhian smile of resignation is probably not the best move.  Contrary to what the Great Souled One urged on the Jews in the path of Germany, Nazi-types will never be moved by Soul Force.

In the face of certain brutality, only physical force is useful.  Brutes know this instinctively, from having been humiliated enough to become violent.   The Nazis did not come to power in Germany on the strength of their ideas– they came to power because they were the most ruthless, determined and disciplined head-breakers in Germany.   They knew that many people who feel powerless admire, and will identify, with decisive, brutal action portrayed in a heroic light.   As for the rest, only a few heads have to be broken publicly before the rest will fall into line.  The Nazis did far more than break heads, they had camps waiting for anyone who opposed them in any way.  Many were killed, starved and brutalized in these camps.

One of the Nazi goals was lebensraum, “living room”, defined by google translate as “habitat” which is also a synonym for heimat, which translates to “homeland”, a phrase modern American fascist types adopted after the attacks on 9/11 that apparently changed history forever.   Nazis invaded Poland, in a brutal and unprovoked blitzkreig, and enslaved the Poles, taking their best land for ethnic Germans.  They also killed most of Poland’s three million Jews while they were there.   The Nazis set the standard for ruthless regimes, we compare all such regimes to those murderous, enslaving no-holds-barred motherfuckers.

1945, using film noirshot after the German surrender, in the months immediately after Mr. Hitler poisoned Eva Braun, and his dog, and shot himself in the mouth, documents what the filmmakers call “the largest episode of ethnic cleansing in history.”   Twelve million ethnic Germans, we are told, were displaced, very badly treated and up to a quarter of a million killed.  Worse ethnic cleansing than the one immediately preceding it?   There’s an argument to be made there.

There are films of atrocious conditions for ethnic Germans forced to flee their new homes, after only five years as lords and masters.  Thousands died on forced death marches back to the old heimat.  As many as 250,000 lost their lives in those terrible post-war months.   In a soccer stadium, in front of a huge Czech crowd, German men were forced to remove their shirts.  The twenty one men with SS tattoos (the SS were the most fanatical of the Nazis, the elite units personally loyal to the Fuhrer) were brutally beaten to death, sadistically, revived with a bucket of cold salt water to the face, beaten again, revived again, beaten until they were dead.   Children were starved.  Several of the survivors cry as they recall what they were subjected to by the brutal “victors” of history’s then most brutal war.

I have to say, I watched this all pretty much unmoved.   Which surprised me.  I couldn’t feel much sympathy for these victims.   I wondered, more than once, why no mention was made of the ethnic cleansing so recently undertaken by the German government.   There was no mention, by the BBC narrator, of the extermination — or even the existence– of so many Jews, homosexuals, Slavic slave laborers and other untermensch enemy of the state types. [2]  There seemed to be no concession to human nature on the part of the filmmakers who describe this brutality as something as abhorrent and incomprehensible as that shown by the Nazis.

I realize I am not a disinterested observer.  Nazis marched through the areas where my grandparents on both sides came from.  When the German army and the SS were done marching through the Ukraine and Belarus, everyone besides my four grandparents in New York were dead.   So beating a few SS men to death for the amusement of a vicious crowd of people recently liberated from Nazi rule does not sound so bestial.   I understand it was horrible for the German men standing shirtless in the stadium as the most fit and brutal among them were beaten to death, but I found myself philosophical about it. 

The experience of watching the documentary and my reaction to it made me understand something troubling about the human condition.  We may be lifelong opponents of torture and sadism, of capital punishment.   But show us the perpetrators of our family’s slow death by starvation, torture and finally shooting and we will, if given the chance, fuck those people up.   This is one of the horrors of the human condition– this limitation of our powers of empathy that fuels the endless cycle of righteous rage and violent revenge.

I get a chance to ponder this horror several times every day, as our Divider-in-Chief regularly throws bloody meat to his irrational “base” and the shrewd billionaires who put him into office.   I don’t generally cheer for the idea of anybody having a painful, prolonged heart attack in the middle of an incoherent world-televised live speech.  But if it has to happen…. if you know what I’m sayin’….

 

[1] Oy yoy yoy!   This BBC production is not the movie my friend told me about!    I went to check the title for the BBC subtitle (“The Savage Peace”) and found this film, also called 1945, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 94%, the one my friend urged me to see:

On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary while the villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk’s son.  The townspeople – suspicious, remorseful, fearful, and cunning, expect the worst and behave accordingly. The town clerk fears the men may be heirs of the village’s deported Jews and expects them to demand their illegally acquired property back.

Guess I’ll have to go to the Lincoln Plaza Cinema to check it out. 

[2] A friend pointed out that the BBC occasionally displays a highly refined, almost irreproachably subtle, version of well-born anti-Semitism.  

 

Note to Rick L. in Chicago

I had a “follow” the other day from a reader/writer named Rick, a person who suffers from a sitting disability.  I read the well-written description of the problem and wanted to write an email, or leave a comment, but, outside of Social Media (aside from this blahg I am decidedly anti-social as far as Twitter, FaceBook and their intrusive intimacy-destroying, democracy-corrupting ilk go), there was no way to get back in touch with Rick L.  Sekhnet, a genius, suggested I write this post.  Hi, Rick.

Your sitting disability, unbearable pain when sitting for any length of time, will be familiar to my friend Rick in Poland,  who has made a religion of regular breaks from his desk to walk and stretch many times a day.   I read about your many attempts to cure the lumbago and sciatica — or even get an accurate medical diagnosis — and kept having only one thought:  Dr. John Sarno. 

Sarno recently died at a ripe old age, but he had a long (and controversial) career helping countless people who came to him in crippling pain (often related to the spine) who could not otherwise get relief or even a helpful medical diagnosis.   I have a post about Sarno here, which you can read as an intro.  I’ve heard (from your namesake Rick) that Sarno’s final book is an excellent source of his theory and practice.   

In a nutshell, Sarno found that much crippling pain of the kind described in Sitting Disability is the result of what he termed TMS, Tension Myoneural Syndrome.  The pain of TMS is the result of oxygen deprivation to the affected muscles and nerves.  TMS is a psychic defense mechanism, the body creates terrible physical pain to mask equally unbearable psychic pain.  Sarno found little correlation between crippling back pain and physical damage to the spine;  patients with TMS sometimes had relatively undamaged spines while patients with herniated discs and otherwise damaged spines sometimes experienced little or no pain.

I find Sarno’s work, which deals with the underlying psychological causes of TMS (which is very real pain), very convincing.  It is certainly worth checking out, especially since you’ve explored virtually every other cure imaginable.  The connection between mind and body is more and more understood today, even as the surgical and pharmaceutical industries continue to dismiss it as hokum.   

Sekhnet also recommends hatha yoga, the gentle daily stretching of all the muscles in the body.  She had relief from terrible chronic back and shoulder pain when she did yoga every morning.  Reminds me, I ought to get up now and stretch my back!

I’ve also heard that regular swimming is excellent therapy for sciatica.   A friend’s mother credited swimming a few times a week, in conjunction with working with John Sarno, for ending her long bout of sciatica.

Good luck with it, Rick, and let me know how it goes if you decide to check out Sarno’s ideas. 

Conspiracy of Interests

Most conspiracies do not happen in the manner set out in the sensational, influential, wholly fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  There is no sinister midnight meeting of eternally scheming characters in an ancient cemetery, where they set out their devilish plans in painstaking detail, assign roles, map out larger strategies for global domination.   Most conspiracies happen on a much more subtle level, based on common interests and shared goals. 

A powerful group with a particular interest will automatically advocate for that interest, without any need for an actual meeting of principals or any assigning of particular roles — they just pursue identical self-interests simultaneously.  Very little systematic coordination is needed.  We see this, for example, in the recent return to Gilded Age style tax policy orchestrated by a loose coalition of Republican legislators, an insane chief executive and a small, determined band of billionaire “Libertarians”, corporate “persons” and upwardly mobile multi-millionaires.  Many super-wealthy people, and wealthy corporate “persons” made it happen, but it’s hard to call their efforts a conspiracy in the classic sense.   

The same thing can happen even within a small group, among people of limited individual power.  I’m reminded of this by a personal experience, brought to mind by the recent odd blind cc of an email string from an emotionally challenged person I long considered a close friend.  A person I now would not hesitate to punch in the face with the full force of cathartic American violence, that face triggering a hard-earned exception to my deeply held belief in the rightness of Ahimsa. 

It was a few years ago, Sekhnet and I were going to take Sekhnet’s then 90 year-old Aunt Lillian to dinner at a great vegetarian Chinese restaurant on Main Street called New Bodai.  Shortly before we were to pick up Lillian this friend called to say that he would like to take his daughter to the same restaurant, along with a mutual friend of ours, an angry and bossy woman he had suddenly become close friends with.  We told them what time we would be at the restaurant; they countered that they’d like to eat a bit earlier, they were all hungry.  We told them how long it would take to pick up Lillian and get to the restaurant.   They agreed to meet us at that time.

When we arrived there were several empty plates on the table.   They cheerily told us not to worry, they’d ordered the same for us, it was already on its way.  We endured a joyless meal, eating dishes we had not ordered, and Lillian was largely ignored during the meal.  We split the tab with these two inconsiderate creatures I eventually came to understand I was no longer friends with.   

It strikes me now that they had not “conspired” in the classic sense of planning to serve an old lady a plate of warmed over shit by way of throwing down any kind of gauntlet.   They had not consciously decided to shit on Sekhnet’s feelings, or her aunt’s, or mine.  They were just feeling giddy to have discovered each other, two long-time friends of somebody they were both in the process of actively alienating anyway.   

The guy, I learned from his bizarre email string, is in the process of divorcing his longtime wife, Hitler.  His sex life with his new girlfriend, he reports, is frustrating and joyless, sad to say.   I haven’t heard from the woman since her mother-in-law’s funeral, which I idiotically attended, though it is certain she still publicly whips her hapless husband in the face with the same sickening gusto as always.

If you deeply share interests with somebody, more likely than a plainly laid out plan of attack, all you will need is a nod and a wink to put things in motion.  As much as many of the super-wealthy hate Trump, a crude, lying, ill-bred boor, when he abolishes the “Death Tax” and they can give every penny of their fortunes without any tax payment required of their chosen heirs, they will nod quietly, savoring their fleeting taste of immortality.

How You Do It

“What difference did it make to Azrael?” I asked him, when he told me how upset Azrael had been when an insect drowned in hot water while he was running a bath.   

“I asked him that after he came out of the bathroom,” he said.  “He’d been running hot water to rinse the tub when a bug he realized was alive a moment too late to save it died a horrible, plunging, drowning death in the pipes.    What he said to explain it to me was so simple it still strikes me.   He said ‘picture your own moment of death — would you like it instant and painless or prolonged and painful?’  I always think of that when I kill a bug, to this day.  That bug desperately swimming for his life away from the sucking drain could have instantly been put out of his mortal terror and unavoidable death by a merciful finger.  

“Azrael had been too slow to react when he saw the bug, at first he didn’t realize it was even alive.  Then he saw it struggling to swim in the hot water away from the drain.  Then he’d watched the bug get swept over Niagra Falls to die an agonizing death by drowning in the churning, unbearably hot water.  It impressed me how awful he felt about not sparing that bug such a miserable death.”  

“Instant and painless or prolonged and painful,” I said.  “I like that.  A no-brainer for a marketing/branding scheme exploiting that no-brainer:   ‘Quick/no pain or slow/maximum pain, your choice.’  It’s appealingly philosophical, too.”    

“Of course, life is not so black and white,” he said.  

“Exactly, which is why such idiotically phrased choices are so irresistible, anyone who’d choose the wrong choice is so obviously wrong.   I like the phrase, and I think we can monetize it, I think it’s a good choice phrase,” I said.  “Plenty of imagery and punch, the rubes will love it.”

“The phrase is fine, monetize away, I’m just sayin’,” he said.  

“You know, it’s not like Azrael was exactly into Ahimsa or any ascetic religious practice that would have made him so sensitive to a bug’s soul.  He ate meat, he’d curse, he was always rough breaking up a fight,” I said.   “He certainly didn’t shrink from hurting anybody.”

“He didn’t, but when you say Azrael ate meat, that’s funny, yeah, he ate meat.  He lived on meat, ate almost nothing besides meat.   He was a shoichet’s assistant, at a place down the street from the butcher’s, from shortly after his bar mitzvah, if I recall correctly, until he started working at the delicatessen,” my brother reminded me.  

“He was one tough son of a bitch,” I said.  

“Yiss,” he said.  

“And he always kept a dog.”  We both remembered Azrael’s dogs.

“Yiss,” my brother said.