Category Archives: Ahimsa

Infinite and Finite

In our finite world scarcity and competition for limited resources are facts of nature, taken for granted.   We are hard-pressed to see the world we live in except in terms of winning and losing.   Most drama in our world centers on the burning question of who will take the lion’s share and be safe in their home and property and who will starve or die young of preventable diseases or violence.    Most live anxiously in between, taking distraction and pleasure where they can, and there are people who will kill you for the money in your pocket.

Other things in this world are infinite and as precious as clean water.   Empathy is infinite, if allowed to flourish, and it saves lives.   The gift of being listened to, heard and understood, having someone take the time to understand — a sadly rare gift that costs nothing to give and is potentially infinite.  Imagine the pain and violence that could be spared, if a person on the edge of rage had only had someone to hear how much they were suffering and ready to give even a small comfort.

I heard a great radio interview a few weeks ago with a woman who worked in an office in a school.  A distraught maniac came into the school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo, ready to kill and then, as the maddening saying goes, “turn the gun on himself” or commit “suicide by police”.  She was the first person he encountered there, and she was in the midst of a day of great personal trouble already when he walked in.   She saw his agony and spoke to him kindly, told him he was loved, called him sweetie, assured him that his life was going to be better than it felt in this terrible moment.  She wound up calming him enough that he didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t turn the gun on himself.  

Many gun-toting maniacs who barge into schools are far past the point of hearing anything, the kindest words in the world will be cut off by their gun shots.  But her actions that day saved many lives, including her own.  They don’t make a movie about her, but she’s a greater hero than most that movies are written about. Antoinette Tuff is this hero’s name.  In looking her up just now I read that a few days ago they sentenced the 21 year-old with the AK-47, who shot at police before Tuff talked him down.   Looking at the photo of the beautiful Ms. Tuff, and reading about her hard life before her heroic moment, they might very well make a movie about her.   She has a book out now and is doing the interview circuit.

Also infinite, the violence rage produces.  It is as inevitable as the “fuck you” many in a hurry, or dealing with their own troubles with no time left, might feel reading something like this on some fool’s blahg.  Abstract bullshit with rose colored shades on, where is the actual content?  Oh, wait:  it’s better to be amazingly kind than to be a common fucking bastard, eh?  Deep.

Our minds create the world we live in, it is said.  The organ of mass media plays upon our senses, all the time, selling without rest, pulsating in our pockets, on a billion screens, it’s echoed by the crickets chirping in the darkness.  All of human genius is focused on perfecting this ever more incredibly sophisticated sales machine.  We cannot see our world without seeing the inevitable — war, competition, violence, hatred, revenge, infuriating piety.  Infuriating piety is as bad as the rest of the plagues, it’s maddening to listen to someone piously announce the difficult truth, presented with a pious idiot’s simple mindedness, leaving no room for discussion.  The certainty of pious people can be maddening, that’s understood.

Picture two kids and their prospects for a happy life and I’ll duck back behind the curtain.  One child, when she wakes afraid in the dark, has an adult who comes, puts a soft hand out, speaks quietly, listens and reassures. The other child wakes afraid in the dark and is met by an angry adult who waits for the child’s wailing to get out of control and then barges in snarling “you’d better shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about!”  

That this goes as well for adults as for children is too self-evident to even try to show.  It is even more important for children, clearly, and for the future of life here.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Vacation

I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest.  Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal.  And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces.   We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad.   “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.  

I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes.  I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts.  Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback.   I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now.  Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.

I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission.  It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part.  The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur.   The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated.  During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often.  I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily.  One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out.  Woken from  a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.

The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal.  We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged.  Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often.  It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.

The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all.   She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free.  I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood.  It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess.   I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as  I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.

The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children.  Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup.  She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too.  My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going.  She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity.  I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities.  Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything. 

I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting.  I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal.  This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake.  I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one.  The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.

Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman.  I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.

Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo.  And not a moment too soon.

Seven Miles from home, New York City Style

We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here.  The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.

Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night?   This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.

We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us.  As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent.  “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him.  At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll.  The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.

By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile.  Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile.  A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour.  We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively.  But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure).  We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30.  It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.  

Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.

 

 

Encouragement

Notice how the word “courage” is the center of that word.   To encourage is to give courage.   Courage is the most important tool we need to forge through difficulty. Being discouraged is the end, temporarily or permanently, of one’s ability to soldier on.

Usually, weighed down with our own troubles, distracted by many distractions, we don’t notice how easy and essential encouragement is.   We may think that nobody encourages us, and we do fine, so what the hell?

I get a call from an old friend whenever his wife, an active volcano, erupts.   She broke the stained glass window of the room he rents to escape from her wrath.   I hear the story, try to be sympathetic, but do I really encourage him?   I give him advice about his strategy, tell him why answering her rage with his own anger may not be the best approach.   He gets slightly defensive, and it’s hard to blame him.   He called for encouragement, he got a bit of possibly helpful, definitely unwanted, advice.

“You are in a war, unfortunately, and every war is different.   I think you’re doing a great job finding ways to hold your enemy at bay.   I commend you, and strength to your arm,” would have been a more encouraging response.

When I told a friend recently that I, with an idealistic and so far unpaid program to save doomed children, am like the man on the falling plane exhorting others to put their oxygen masks on before helping others– while not wearing my own, I secretly hoped he would disagree.   He nodded sadly, thought the image was very apt.    It had the opposite of an encouraging effect, no matter how realistic the image might have been.

When a friend is engaged in a difficult or even impossible quest, do we encourage them or do them more of a favor by gently trying to bring them back into the real world, unacceptable as that real world might be?    Silence, of course the most obvious option, generally does little to advance either of these mercies.

Gratefulness out of the blue

On the way downtown, to do the animation workshop with a small group of women fighting chronic diseases:

Bellowing, barking, enraged
man paces short track on empty
uptown A platform
screaming and kicking

on the way down
I had to squeeze past
an oblivious young couple
blocking the stairs
with ten feet clear on either side
“excuse me,” I mumbled
not pausing as I passed
“YOU SHOULD SAY ‘EXCUSE ME”!”
the bellicose voice shouted after me
“I did,” I said
a moment before arriving
on the platform to see my train’s
tail lights
disappear into the tunnel

sat and struck up a tune
on the ukulele
man next to me, as soon as I paused,
went into a lusty falsetto improvisation
in another key entirely,
if any.

Zipped the uke back into its bag,
watched the screaming man
across the tracks
bark and dance to the duet
he was performing
with the falsetto singer.

Mercifully,
this super cool train
arrived within a moment
and I am grateful
for that
impersonal mercy.

Then, downtown, moments after my volunteer assistant cancelled at the last possible minute, and it seemed there would be only four of us (two more of the original 8 showed up late), to my great surprise, the five women made like a bunch of kids, working together and coming up with some very cool animation.  You can see it here (you might need dropbox to see it.  I’ll post it elsewhere soon):

adults playing like kids

 

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Enraged customer at the car wash

The weather service had been calling for severe thunderstorms the other day, but as the sky was clear when I set out, and my errand not long, I didn’t go back for rain gear, which in retrospect was a mistake.

The walk home from the store was about 3/4 of a mile and as I hit the bridge on Broadway I saw that I was walking into a dark vault.  The sky ahead was dark grey as far as I could see downtown. The entire sky, in every direction ahead of me, looked threatening as a tumor.  There were virtually no places to seek shelter between where I was and my apartment, about fifteen minutes away by foot.  When I got across the bridge, the first large drops fell.  Within a block it began coming down with intent to drench.  I made a dash and took refuge in the store attached to the car wash, the only place within several blocks to duck into. I found shelter a moment before the deluge began.

The rain came down like it was looking to flood the earth.   Within minutes there was a deep lake in the street in front of the car wash.   Cars passing through it sent plumes of water up over the sidewalk.   I moved further into the store eventually taking a stool in the back, and I watched the rain, figuring it probably couldn’t rain that hard for much longer.  It did, though.

Eventually another guy who’d taken refuge there took the stool next to mine.  A moment later we exchanged pleasantries about the weather.  He was a sympathetic looking man, slight and brown, looking something like Gandhi, but from the Dominican Republic, he said, his English almost completely unaccented.  I’d have guessed his background was Indian, actually.

I told him this kind of summer shower usually doesn’t last very long.  I recounted how I’d once been soaked in a very quick summer downpour in NYC making a sprint to beat the rain.  I’d been on a bike and when I reached 8th Avenue and 47th Street the skies opened up. Instead of finding cover, I rode like mad and arrived at 47th and 9th Avenue, one block away, drenched, socks and shoes and everything in my pockets soaked, dripping wet.  When I entered the place I was going, water running off me, people looked at me in disbelief.  I looked behind me to discover the sun was shining brightly, the street hardly even looked wet.  I’d learned from that summer shower to duck under something and wait out these flash rains.

But this one continued full-bore for over an hour, and my neighbor and I passed the time in a most pleasant and far-ranging chat while the thunder thundered and the buckets of dirty water fell.   At one point an irate customer barged into the store where we were sitting and began screaming at the girl behind the counter. “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!” he screamed several times, snarling and glaring angrily between screams.   He was at a loss to make the unfairness of it clear.  He turned to scream at one of the African car wash attendants “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!”.  As he stormed out to where he car was he shouted it to everyone a couple of times.   

Evidently some terribly aggravating thing was being done to him, it was unjust, they’d lied to him and then screwed him and it wasn’t fair.   That much seemed clear.   But the ferocity of his screaming really was kind of amazing.   It was also, I realized, the self-lacerating bellow of helplessness– they are screwing me and there’s nothing I can fucking DO ABOUT IT!

My neighbor and I paused, exchanged philosophical looks, and I said they’d probably promised to do something like change his oil, but had run out of oil filters, and they’d kept him waiting over an hour to give him the disappointing news.   He agreed it must have been something like that.   As the enraged man passed us on the way to his car, still screaming, I said quietly I hoped he wasn’t going to get a gun.   It was the kind of blind rage that, silly as the immediate cause for it might have seemed, if he’d been holding a gun he probably would have used it to try to discharge some rage.

My neighbor opened his eyes a little wider, and said he doubted the guy was going for a gun.  I agreed that he was probably right.   As it turns out, he was correct and nobody was hurt, except for the man who had been screaming.   We chatted for another twenty minutes or so, as the storm continued to rage all around, until one of the workers told us apologetically that it was time to go, they were closing the store.   We thanked them for their hospitality, shook hands, introduced ourselves by name for the first time, and headed off in opposite directions to get soaked.

It rained hard for my entire walk home.   Luckily I’d thought to take a plastic bag to wrap my electronics in, because I and my groceries got drenched.   My phone, wallet and iPod did not get wet.   It poured and thundered for a couple of hours, and it was a cold rain.   Actually felt a little good to be wet and shivering on a brutally humid day that had recently been about 85 degrees.   Once I showered and wrung out my clothes I felt refreshed.

I don’t think anything felt very good that day to the man who’d been treated so unfairly by those otherwise decent folks at the car wash.

A little more love for Florence

I wrote to thank Florence’s children and grandchildren for a wonderful and inspiring celebration of a remarkable and brilliant old friend.  I’d been moved and distracted yesterday, when I spoke briefly at the memorial, during one of the breaks in the string ensemble’s performance of some of Florence’s favorite pieces, and wanted to make sure to add these thoughts:

Florence was an inspiration to many people, and to me in particular.  Her embrace of every aspect of creativity, and her nurturing of creativity in others, had a deep influence on me.  Her gentleness, her wide-ranging intellect, her humor, her love of life and her art work exerted a subtle but strong transformational force.  I attribute much of the best of who I am today to her generous, kind, whimsical influence, and her love.
 
Her beloved little brother told me, under a gentle interrogation, that she took some piano lessons for a while but never got that far on the instrument.  Still, this most musical painter’s love of music, and understanding of the underlying geometry of Bach’s music, was so profound that she could effortlessly put a counterpoint melody in exactly the right place against and among the beats and notes in a two part rock guitar jam.  It delights me as much now, remembering it, as it did when she sang that invention in real time late one night in the living room on Aberdeen Road, not long before her 90th birthday.
 
It could be said that her art deserved to be more widely known, and that she should have had some measure of fame and financial security from her brilliant, deep and masterfully executed paintings and other works.  Though she would have no doubt liked those things, I don’t think it bothered her very much as she went about her life and work.   She had more substantial things on her mind.   As Russ pointed out (and as she described in that wonderful piece about the creative benefits she derived from smoking), all of her many interests and loves seemed to focus themselves more and more into that hard to describe source of light and life energy that emanated from and flowed into the center of many of her paintings and her octamandalagons.  I watched happily as the mysterious force that Russ described shone out of the images in the slide show, as her favorite music was beautifully played and she was present, smiling, in that room.
 
I wrote this shortly after she died, and I meant to share it as well:
 
a few more words of gratitude about Florence
 
and two links to Florence’s work and words
 
two Florence links– wonderful stuff