Category Archives: Ahimsa

Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey.   They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years.   I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects)  and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat.  Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds.  The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse.  Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm.  Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.  

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for?   They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime?  Then it hit me.  They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat.  Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind.  There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged:  when cooked skillfully we are delicious.   We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid.  Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners.  No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed.   They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over.  No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side.   Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.  

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, Mr. President.  Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour.  On the other hand, sir, what the fuck?  I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it.  I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness.   I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.  

He looked at me like “this surprises you?   That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way?   You look surprised.  Pathetic.  How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”  

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives.   Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man.  I got two words for you:  Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know.  The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life.  A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed.  Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with.  Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple.  Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject.  What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat?  Less sentient than the ones who live on land?  Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere.  God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

De gustibus

The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction.  He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing.   He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.

Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music.  Any music.”  

She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”  

A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment.  In another wink, the old man was gone.

Truculence in Human Affairs

I had originally thought of “vehemence”, but truculence, which has none of the better associations of vehemence and contains all the violence, cruelty, heartlessness and unyieldingness, conveys it better.   Once you see truculence on someone’s face, it cannot be unseen.

I think of my father, whose mother affectionately called him “Sonny”. I picture looking at her through his indescribably colored eyes– hazel, maybe, a diffuse, pale greenish color like the sea in a certain stormy light, but always guarded so it was hard to make out any color at all.  Those eyes, as an infant, had seen, too many times to forget, this little red-haired woman rising suddenly from her chair as a savage, whip-brandishing maniac.  Not only did she brandish the whip, her face turned merciless as she vehemently brought the whip down on his babyish face, grunting and cursing and acting out an insane and unslakable rage.  The pain of the whipping was only half of the pain, the other was that the mother who was supposed to be protecting and nurturing you was, instead, attacking you violently and as only an insane person could.  

How could my father ever unsee this when he looked at his mother? He could not.

The role this kind of savagery plays in human life, it seems to me, cannot be overstated.  How does a person kill another person (excluding self-defense situations)  without having experienced this overwhelming feeling of betrayal, abuse, humiliation?   It’s hard to imagine.  Having seen the truculence of someone determined to do you harm, it’s easy to imagine why people buy weapons, insist on their right to carry them around, have no moral problems with war, torture, or any policy designed to kill, injure, starve or weaken potentially truculent enemies.

I was reminded of this truly vicious cycle by a dream I had the other night.   In the dream a former friend was resolutely determined not to apologize, too niggardly, he admitted, though he also allowed that he owed me an apology.   He told me that, considering he was being such an unyielding jerk about it, it would not be wrong of me to punch him in the face.  I was unable to do so, each time I tried my fist would stop right before the moment of impact and just touch his jaw lightly.

Seeing me unable to punish him he laughed, mockingly, and began over-acting, the way a weak man goes about demonstrating what he thinks of as superiority.   He may have said something unkind about me trying to be fucking Ahimsa-Boy, but whatever he said, that and the satisfied, sadistic expression on his face finally did the trick.  I saw that merciless, unrepentant, provocative face and no thought or effort was involved– I punched it.  Hard.   The moment of impact was satisfying, but the moment after, quite bad.

It wasn’t so much that I had departed from my vow to remain mild, or that I’d given vent to a violent impulse.   I saw I’d given him a black eye, and he was glaring at me, afraid and enraged.  I pictured a likely outcome– an assault complaint, being fingerprinted at the police station, fees to lawyers, a long bureaucratic hassle for doing something I’d felt completely entitled to, had, in fact, been invited to do.   I was angry at myself for letting my anger put me in this vulnerable position.

Think of human history.  It is, as often as not, the story of armed bands of men attacking, starving, brutalizing other groups of people, taking their land, their livestock, raping, pillaging.  How do people do this?  It’s easy, it turns out.  

We took a walk to a beautiful nature preserve built on the site of an ancient city and a fortress.  The signs told the story eloquently.  People lived here, built these walls to live in peace within them.  In 490 BCE a violent group came, besieged the place for 36 days, sacked it, killed everyone they didn’t enslave and renamed it after their glorious leader.  Next to indications of the year, perhaps a dozen or more times over the centuries, descriptions of the who and how the place had been besieged, sacked, inhabitants killed or enslaved, the name changed: glory to the victors.  Romans, Crusaders, Muslim warriors, men of God killing for peace, paving the road to heaven with the bones of their faceless enemies, painting the signposts with their blood.

Hard to understand, any of it, unless we make it personal.  Picture the implacable face of someone who has hurt you.  Picture it trying to stare you down, make you turn your eyes away.  It is a face you will not forget soon and, among all the faces you can imagine, probably the most likely to make you forget your vow to do no harm.

Epilogue to Childhood Memory

The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit.  In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.  

There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai.   Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories.  There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome.  No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war.  The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody.  Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them!  Make them pay!

Intellectual understanding only goes so far.  I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence.  I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up.   Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far.   Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.  

In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus.  If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.

There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency.   I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.

I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada.  It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood.  Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners.   History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention.   I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.

Head in Hands (labored re-creation)

This afternoon, at a loss for anything better to do, and having written that piece referencing Cheney that activated Sekhnet’s PTSD and made her cry one sentence in (where I stopped), I found myself sitting in the universal pose of resigned inaction, head in hands.  My few chores done and a futile attempt at a restorative nap aborted, I sat wearily at my desk near the window overlooking Sekhnet’s farm and my head sank into my hands.  I sat that way for a long moment.  The symbolism of this posture dawning on me, I lifted my head, opened this computer and resolutely tapped out a few hundred words that disentangled some tendrils, put it about as well as I can.  

It was a different kind of post than most of these and it felt like a good day’s work.  Writing it put my thoughts and feelings in order, explained some things I was hard pressed to understand or express and salvaged an otherwise fairly bleak and low-energy day for me.

Sekhnet and I went shopping and after the long trip I opened the blahg to read it to her.  There was no sign of the new piece anywhere, not in drafts, not in the trash.  “Head in Hands” does not exist, I was informed.  I was sure I’d hit publish, I’d definitely selected the categories, which appear below this post now, which I have already saved now three times.  It was hard to believe I had never even once saved the draft.  I hadn’t shut off the computer or logged out of WordPress, yet, no trace of the ninety minutes of writing.  

Seeing it wiped away at the moment I was going to read it to Sekhnet I felt panic and then rage, at once it became the most profound thing I’d ever managed to write, of course, being now irretrievably lost.  In despair I realized how impossible it would be to recreate the integrity of the piece, whatever music it had contained.  It took all I had not to scream or smash something.  Sekhnet was sympathetic, immediately reminded me I should always save my work, no matter what, we’ve both learned the hard way, blah blah blah, helpful advice I couldn’t listen to.  850 something posts on this blahg with no hitch that I can recall, maybe one.   Fitting reward at the end of a day I dragged myself through, to have some of my best work wiped away without a fucking trace and for no explainable reason.  I went outside and stalked for a mile.   

I’d started off wondering if dysthymia had me by the neck lately and posted a link to a wiki describing the condition.   I compared the inevitable hopeless feeling to music, the depressed theme striking a familiar chord, persistent fatigue providing the bass, empty stretches of senseless inaction like a sad string section, the dulled, receding emotions forming amusical harmonies to a background music as pervasive and hideous as the sickeningly effective ad jingle that plays involuntarily in your head.  

I mused about the genetic component of dysthymia and described my mother setting out for work every day, carrying dysphoria on her shoulders, working all day, coming home on the train, cooking us dinner, watching TV, reading, looking forward to the emotional release of the opera Live from the Met that throbbed from the stereo every Sunday (it may have been every Saturday).  She became tearful easily, was often angry, over-ate, reported feeling blue when she was alone, though she was always convivial and had a good sense of humor in company.

I spent hours alone in the basement, listening to blues records, the same sides over and over, playing along on an acoustic guitar, learning the ropes.  Friends came and went, I never questioned their qualifications or motives.  I enjoyed interacting with them, cherish a few of them still, but probably spent much more time by myself than in their company.  When alone I worked in one expressive medium or another, it always seemed important to me to express myself well.  I follow the same practice now.  

This tendency to isolation is quite possibly a symptom of dysthymia, a diagnosis I dismissed, a hazy condition easily waved off because it lacks the sharp drama of a scary depression, or a rising anxious terror, or the wild mania that will land one in the Emergency Room.  The proclivity to oversensitivity and introspection could also be called part of an artistic temperament, I suppose, but that temperament famously comes at a steep price.

I was considering, in far less words than this, that I should probably go off to work every day, or at least several times a week.  Any work, meaningful or not is not important, the main thing is to keep oneself busy.  This is universal therapy practiced by most people in the world and much mischief and violence are the result of enforced idleness, too much time on one’s hands.  Working people have routines and stay busy, the validation they get from doing their jobs well is part of what makes their lives make sense to them, makes them feel productive.  At the end of the day they have a good reason to be tired, to relax and unwind, and they have to be ready to get up for work early the next day so too much emotional heavy lifting is out of the question.  

Unlimited time to ponder and imagine is not a good thing in the long run.  It is difficult, maybe impossible, to sustain vital creativity in isolation anyway.  Creativity is intended to be shared, it’s collaborative by its nature.   You may sometimes create fine work, hone it to a great smoothness and clarity, provoke thoughts and feelings in a unique way, but such work, done primarily for yourself, has an element of madness to it, is not complete as expression until it is received by another.  It is necessary to find a partner or two, it seems to me, if the work is going to have real meaning and resilience.  Things I write here for a small handful of readers, sometimes true things, at times elusive but obvious when pinned down, a good in and of itself.  But in another sense: what the fuck?

I noted that with no warning, today, I find myself again in that hot August night outside Vishnevitz, the tortured little town where we’d been forced to fence ourselves into a crowded quarter six months earlier, using barbed wire, splintered boards, chicken wire, plaster.  They’d forced us to pay for it too, with money we needed for food and medicine, and now had finally marched those of us who survived to the side of the ravine, my tiny nephews and nieces walking at the unnatural pace of the feeble, hobbling elders I’d assisted up the road.  

This forced march was supervised by our neighbors, people who cursed their difficult lives and had for centuries looked with superstitious ignorance for someone to take it out on, to make pay.   These captive fellow citizens of Vishnevitz had been ordered to murder by conscripted German men brainwashed by a madman in a society conditioned by generations of militarism, conformity and war.   The Ukranians collaborated gladly, having the chance to freely pour out the hatred and humiliation that had been boiling in them for generations.  

They made the night stink with their drunken anti-Semitic songs and their infernal banging to cover the groans and cries.  I tried not to look at them, what was the point?  There was nothing to say.  Why give them the satisfaction?  Humans, these were not exactly that.  The deadly play was written in blood and shit by people who hated themselves, murderers.

“Goddamn it Vasily, I hate this fucking life, I curse my goddamned mother for bringing me into this fucking life, Vasily.  Give me the goddamned vodka, Vashke, and we’ll do what we have to do.  Fooh!  It tastes like your stinking spit, Vasily.  That’s OK.  It’s good.  Let us do what we came here to do to these fucking kykes, OK.”

There was no point to run, nowhere to go and the old people and the children couldn’t run anyway, there was nothing to be done, no expression to even have on your face.  Running would only provide a moment of challenge and excitement for these reptiles, and they have excellent depth perception and three dimensional vision, reptiles.  I said nothing, my face two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  I flattened myself into two dimensions, both eyes on one side of my profile, fuck you, reptile.

Why invent the time machine for this particular trip, I cannot say.  Pessimism is wrong, nothing good can come from it.  It is not always right to be optimistic, of course, but hope is a better mistake than hopelessness.  In a world of miracles and atrocities there comes a time to simply sit with your head in your hands sometimes.  It just is what it is, as they say and, as I did not make the world, I just live in it, for whatever time I am given.

The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario

One of the great bullshit hypotheticals, used to justify medieval barbarity that is both immoral and useless: the ticking time bomb scenario.   In this fantasy you have captured the insane fanatic who’s planted a powerful bomb somewhere where it will imminently kill thousands.  Make it a dirty bomb, or a suitcase nuke, even better, poised to take out two million innocent citizens in a major city.  You have the undeniably guilty guy, handcuffed to a chair, smirking, the bomb ticking away somewhere: what do you do?  You spend five seconds consulting your lawyers, who nod grimly and turn away, and then you do whatever it takes to get the insane fanatic to tell you where the bomb is hidden.

Of course, if it’s planted in Grand Central Station he’ll tell you St. Patrick’s Cathedral, send you up to the Bronx where the President, the Pope and dignitaries of all nations are visiting Poe Cottage.  It’s such a bullshit scenario it’s not even worth thinking about– if the guy is ready to die for what he believes is his cause, and knows the bomb is set to go off in twenty minutes, what’s his motivation to tell you the truth just because you’ve attached electrodes to his testicles?  The real terror of torture is that it will be endless.  Most fanatics can take twenty minutes of the worst you can dish out standing on their heads, naked in an icy room full of hissing snakes.

The real ticking time bomb is us, our lives.  Not that we’re going to explode, necessarily, the end, in the words of an immortal anti-Semitic poet, is as likely a whimper as a bang, but our personal extinction is certain.  That suspicious mole on my left leg just above the knee?  Too bad you didn’t have it looked at six months ago, the dermatologist will say, we could have saved the leg, your life.  Melanoma is treatable when it first appears– now you’d better start going through that mass of papers in your apartment, there may be time for a cruise with Sekhnet, if you schedule it today and make it a short one.  

A week stealthily turns into three weeks, to a month of Sundays, to the limit of human endurance.   Your great idea, the unwritten novel, the memoir…. pffffft.  For some the certainty of an unknowable end drives them to make the most of every moment.  For others, the vague dread causes them to steer as far from the heart of it as they can.  If I do not think about my death, well, maybe… oh, you know, I’d better stay busy!

I listened to another interview with a famous writer yesterday.  They very matter of factly discussed the prolific author’s bouts of depression, uncertainty, paralysis.  The lot of every creative, introspective person, it would appear– a certain amount of torment and self-doubt.  Most creative people are troubled, it seems, the greatest comedians are often tortured souls.  Are you surprised when a great poet puts her head in the oven?  The only surprise is the lack of a farewell note.  Not to bring up a sore subject, but, Bill Cosby, at the height of his fame, when he was a handsome rock star with a killer wit who could have any woman in the world, and in the years that followed, preferred his women unconscious.  I mean… what?  

The trick, I suppose, when trying to ride this impossibly high horse– the view from which often makes old friends invisible, they can’t be expected to understand the things that drive someone to practice arts they do not even try to sell– is to maintain a kindness toward oneself, toward the world.  Remain interested in others, be mild, do not complain, do not raise the lash over your own back for failures to move an impossibly heavy boulder endlessly up an endless hill.  

The clock is ticking, true, but it ticks in any case.   Set reasonable goals, take human bites.  The clock may well run out on you, as it does on us all, but succumbing to the pressure of the relentless ticking… as good an option as futilely torturing that sick fuck in the chair who smiles as you slice at him.  He ain’t telling you where the goddamn bomb is, Dick, no matter what your lawyers tell you about the tortured legality of the unspeakable things you are doing to him. 

The Spirit of Rosh Hashanah Past

My father grew up in an orthodox Jewish home, in ‘grinding poverty’, as he always phrased it.  My mother’s cousin, whose family moved many times during the Depression to get a free month’s rent here and there, told me a few years ago “we were poor, but your father’s family was really poor.”  I don’t doubt my father’s childhood was a nightmare.  He was still clawing his way through it on his deathbed in a Florida hospital seven decades later.

His tyrannical, violent mother was the religious one.  I don’t know that his father particularly cared one way or the other, though he swept the synagogue for a dollar or two a week.  My paternal grandfather was described to me as eternally deadpan; his face simply two eyes, a nose and a mouth.   My father’s mother would give generously to the synagogue, even though they had almost nothing themselves.  Nobody there was in any position to question this practice.    

My father became less and less religious over the years.  Bacon started being cooked in the house at some point during my childhood (he didn’t eat it) and eventually, and much to my disappointment, somehow, he tasted pork in a Chinese restaurant.  He liked it, though, to my knowledge he only did this once.  Growing up we’d hear: I’m so hungry I could eat ham!  Something he got from his days in the army when Corporal Israel ate side dishes at meals of ham.  Like many modern American Jews, he took the High Holidays seriously, bought his expensive ticket and sat and stood and sat (“please be seated”) and stood (“please rise”) all day at the services I found so hypocritical and meaningless.  

My mother had no use for religion, although she proudly identified as a cultural Jew, could not have been mistaken for anything else, really, except, maybe, ethnic Italian.   My sister and I stayed out of the synagogue too, for the most part, after experiences there that probably turned off many to the rituals of our ancient religion.  I often said my experience at Hillcrest Jewish Center Hebrew School turned me into an anti-Semite, though that’s an overstatement for effect.  The heart of religion is good.  I’d have to think the heart of every religion is.   The practice is where the trouble generally comes in.  

I have a few friends who take deep comfort from the rituals of religion; I don’t.  I cannot look past the dark side, the crimes and bloodshed so many avowedly religious people take part in, with the monomaniacal self-righteousness that comes from believing God smiles on their horrible acts.  The examples are too well known to require any listing here.   But the experience of wonder, of gratefulness for the many gifts of this world, the impulse to create, to be gentle, to laugh, to share, to care, to repair what is in need of fixing, all these are encompassed by most religious teachings.  

The religious background I had was Judaism and my values were informed by its stories.  There are two Jewish holidays I find very meaningful and that have shaped my life to a great extent.  One is Passover, the holiday that commemorates the eternally incomplete journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the world.  A Jew is commanded to retell the story at the seder, an ordered meal that sets out a template for the discussion of values.  This was always a serious discussion in my childhood home, as it is at the seder Sekhnet and I now attend every year.   The value expressed is realizing there is no difference between the children of the rich and the children of the poor and oppressed.  

We are encouraged to take the lesson of our people’s persecution to heart: to identify with the stranger, the other, the underdog, the slave, the oppressed, and reaffirm our commitment to fighting for justice for everyone.   I find this holiday very meaningful and important.  It has probably influenced me more than it should have, I haven’t separated out the symbolism to the extent most practical people do.  

The other holiday I find profound and valuable is the New Year tradition of seeking forgiveness and releasing others from our anger.  We are commanded to make amends with those we’ve injured in the past year during the ten days of repentance, between New Year’s Eve and Yom Kippur, when our fate for the coming year is metaphorically sealed by our imaginary protector with the long beard, the Creator, blessed be He, who created everything miraculous and, because he is all merciful, left humans to figure out what to do about the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, Cheneys, the raping priests and bloodthirsty preachers.  

The blessings are all from God, the man upstairs; the curses of mankind, as theodicy concludes, are all the result of humans’ misuse of the free will generously bestowed by the Holy Name.  Yeah, yeah.   Fuck all that shit.  The part that interests me is the tradition of righting our psychic accounts at this time of year.  We are supposed to honestly search our lives over the past year for times we have behaved badly, acted wrongly, hurt others.  It is our duty to humbly seek to make things better, to apologize, forgive, offer peace instead of further bad karma.  Prayer and good intentions won’t do it, we have to humbly approach humans and keep our vows to act better.  

It is far easier to see the harms others have done to us than to take an honest inventory of our own hurtful actions and cruel inactions.  I see this more clearly every year as I ponder.  Also, how hard it is to forgive the unrepentant, even as I am challenged to sincerely repent for things I’ve done that I can’t imagine were as hurtful as they may well have been.    

I always think of one Yom Kippur when I went, as usual, to meet my father outside the synagogue after a long day of fasting and services, everybody ashen faced and bad-breathed, trudging off in the gathering darkness with quick, tottering steps to break their day-long fast.  I walked down there as services were getting out, met him and we walked back home, less than a half a mile along Union Turnpike in Queens.   I had a long list of bad things my father had done and would never apologize for, including many terrible failures that had undermined my sister and me over the years, but I’d formulated it as one thing I needed to put on the table.  I’m sure I’ve written out this story before, but I’ll offer the fast version of it here.  

I am reminded of this because my closest friend, a very good man, about the best man you can imagine, has too much pain from his mother’s long betrayals to find it in his heart to truly forgive her for her considerable limitations.   I don’t hammer at it often, though I’ve brought it up over the years, he will be gentle with her as she lays dying, there is no doubt, and it is a shame the healing won’t start until then.  Life is a very painful matter sometimes.  

Anyway, the particular Yom Kippur I’m describing my mother was putting the finishing touches on some no doubt delicious dinner and I sat across from my father in the living room.  I had fasted, as I always do on Yom Kippur, not in fear of God, if there is such a thing, but because it is a good practice, and I always think I should do it more than that one day a year.  If we never feel hungry how do we remember what it is that much of the world experiences every day?

My father was a brilliant, adroit and witty man.  He used these skills brutally much of the time.  His humor had a sting to it, more often than not.  His skills in constructing arguments were used to build impregnable walls around his vulnerable childish heart.  He regretted these things on his death bed.  But walking back from the shul that Yom Kippur he was silent as a sphinx, cautious, waiting to defend himself against anything I might say.  

What I said when we sat in the living room in the little house I grew up in was that I was glad to hear his fatherly advice, provided he stopped using it as a delivery system for his hostility.  I would no longer tolerate being reduced to the sum of my faults while listening to the harsh things “your friends are too spineless to tell you.”   Whether my friends had spines or not, I needed to be treated respectfully by my angry father.  I told him if this did not happen we would no longer have the pretense of a relationship.  I reminded him of my many attempts to make peace with him and he fought as hard as he could not to give a millimeter.  I was determined, and undeterred, and in the end he agreed that he would try to do better.  We broke the fast.

“That’s what you have to do with a bully,” my friend would agree, “be direct, do not back down, do not give in to fear or anger.  Keep pushing the fucker back, it is the only thing a bully understands.  Good for you.”   So, for the next fifteen years or so my father and I had a superficially better relationship.  

At the end of that fifteen years he revealed, during an argument in which he was for the first time overmatched, that he’d only pretended to change his feelings toward me, that if he ever told me what he really felt it would do “irreparable harm” to our relationship.  Checkmate, Dad, have it your way, you win.  And for the last two years, as unbeknownst to both of us he was steadily dying from undiagnosed liver cancer, we kept things cooly superficial.  In the meantime I realized how damaged he was, and that he could not do any better, that it was up to me to make some kind of peace with it.  I made some kind of peace with it, lucky for both of us it was a couple of months before he started actively nosediving toward death.

As he was dying, of course, he lamented his lifelong inability to be truly open to people, to experience real intimacy, to express love.   “I wish we could have had this kind of conversation fifteen years ago,” he said weakly toward the end of the last conversation of his life, “but I was just too fucked up.  It’s my fault, I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years…”.  I recall thinking at the time what a modest and pathetic wish that was– thirty-five years of senseless war and fifteen years of peace.

Of course, I’d take it now, fifteen years, five years, one year, a week, another 24 hours.  There is not time enough to heal certain wounds and it is an uncertain process at best.   We are all left to heal ourselves, as best we can, and to stay open and caring to those who share our best hopes for a good world.  There is no time to struggle with drowning souls determined to take us with them to the nightmare depths as they irrationally defend their right to drag us with them, but the time for healing– very important time.

Generativity vs. Stagnation, again

There is no shortage of irony here.  

I am striving to bring interactive creativity and fun into places where these things are spoken of highly but rarely practiced; myself, creative, yes, but not having much fun.  

The program I’ve already implemented is capable of injecting some encouraging news into the depressing discussion of American education, the non-discussion of real participatory democracy; I am a marginal participant not actively discussing the issue with anyone who cares.  

The program is therapeutic, I saw haggard women with chronic disease transformed into laughing girls at the end of our sessions; it gratified me, but, burdened with logistics, I was not laughing with them.  

I’ve solved dozens of logistical and psychological problems so far, though some very large, possibly insoluble, ones remain.  With the best of intentions, as I try to maintain my focus on promoting this inclusive, participatory program, I have somehow become a kind of hanging judge.  

Nuance has become harder for me to discern; holding multiple truths in mind, and choosing the one that casts the best light– not always possible.  I listen to the prosecutor making his relentless case, nod my unsmiling head.  Fine, I think, give the guy the chair, let the Court of Appeals worry about it, there are many worse tragedies happening everywhere.  Bang the gavel, next case.  

I’m not always able to refrain from doing what was so hateful to me watching my father do it:  reducing a person to the sum of his faults.  We are flawed, all of us, and gracefully accepting the flaws of others is an important part of being a decent person.  Whipping a fucking goat?   Really?  I take pride in not being the sort of person who inflicts harm, particularly on those with limitations.  Lately I couldn’t rest until I’d given a particular animal a hard kick in the ribs.  The thing was perhaps less than perfectly thoughtful, or even characteristically oblivious, but in either case, why the need to kick it? 

The seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is called Generativity vs. Stagnation.  Being productive, successful and involved in the world during the middle and later stages of adulthood versus being isolated and removed from the world, dogged by feelings of failure and hopelessness.  The eighth and final stage, Integrity vs. Despair, takes place at the end of life, looking back, when one feels satisfied at a life well and authentically lived or is bitter and full of regrets.  

I embarked on a project of encouraging expression, using free play as an educational strategy.   I undertook this ambitious project knowing nothing about how to plan and build a business, how to run an HR department, how to secure funding to hire professionals needed for several live or die jobs.   I have no connections or friends who can fill these gaps.

The program is a success, as far as implementing it in five minutes anywhere, as far as how easily it does what it purports to do.   The student-run workshop vindicated my best hopes for how it would work.  The creativity and competencies of young kids, and ailing adult women, for that matter, exceeded my expectations.   Yet, not having a network of people in a position to participate productively… so far enforced stagnation.  

Those who don’t understand what I am striving for, or who take no interest in it, who now quite sensibly avoid the subject, I can’t help thinking of as partial jerks, even as I know I have only a passing interest in all the details of their working lives.   I was surprised and touched when a hard-working friend took a few moments to enquire about the progress of my program a couple of months ago.  I told him the program itself, curriculum and all, works smoothly and wonderfully wherever we’ve done it, and that now I am focused on packaging, promoting and selling it.  

I described my initial hope– that kids would work together to produce original animation in a workshop setup where adults would set things in motion and step back as children learn and teach each other.   This big taste of autonomy fosters students’ confidence, brings out peer-mentoring and leadership skills.  It has happened quickly every place we’ve done the workshop, about a hundred times so far.  

Now that the program itself works smoothly, I told my friend, I am wrestling with the crucial tasks of packaging and promoting it.  I told him I’m optimistic that someone in di Blasio’s administration would be quite interested in the presentation that I have recently put together, that is just about ready to roll.

He told me he now understands the important goals I set for the program, the workshop’s many great applications.  He said he was impressed by how well thought out it was, acknowledged the tremendous amount of work I’d done and the ingeniously simple design of the program.  He wished me success, strength to my arm and told me he agreed that di Blasio’s people would be very interested in a program capable of producing a cadre of peer-teachers entering Middle School.  

This reaction was as wonderful as it was rare.  We have but one measure of success in our society and until friends read about the program in a NY Times piece, or hear a well-crafted moment about it on NPR, it is a dream I am dreaming alone as I sleep my fitful sleep.

One more note in the polyphony of my imperfect sleep: my attempts to avoid bitterness in old age seem ironic to me much of the time these days.  These attempts are hampered by the difficulty of living by words I have written on pages many times with various calligraphy pens, words I must inscribe in my heart as I find ways to become more actively and productively involved in the world:  cultivate mindful empathy.  Everybody we encounter is fighting a hard battle against killer odds.  Just because somebody almost never keeps their word, for example, is no reason to write off the rest of their virtues.  

Now, if you will excuse me, there are some kittens in the garden I have to go be sarcastic to.

kittens