Painting

So here's the back story on yesterday's poem, for those of you who asked: I wrote it about my high school girlfriend. (Curve ball there, eh?) We remained friends after I came out and we took a trip to Key West with another friend, which inspired the setting -- but at the same time, our relationship was changing and we were headed in very different directions. She's now married with two kids in Florida, and I still get in touch with her once or twice a year. This is actually one of the few poems I ever had published, in a small literary magazine called Tin Wreath.

I watched another Andy Warhol movie last night -- "Heat," with Joe Dallesandro and Sylvia Miles. I'm sure these movies must have inspired John Waters. They make me want to bathe.

I've started painting my apartment. What an ordeal! I hope to finish it up by the end of tomorrow, but there are no guarantees.

(Photo: Lower East Side, Aug. 2008)

Islands

I.
the islands
long and grey as animals
still
alive

air bright and wet
water silver as mercury

sliced by the keel


II.
stretched on the bow
hot as a mirror
you take my hand

you open your mouth to laugh
the islands laugh
for the last time
past your even white teeth


Poem from 1988 - for BDR.
Photo: Palm in Port Charlotte, Fla.

Plaque

Has anything more useless than a plaque ever been invented?

I was cleaning out a box of stuff this week, prompted by a desire to send some of my old children’s books to my niece. That plan proved impractical, because on closer examination the books were falling apart and were hideously dated. I wound up keeping two and recycling the rest.

Meanwhile, I came upon a roughly 9-by-12-inch plaque that I received in 1988 as graduating editor of my college paper. Truth be told, I sort of ordered this plaque for myself! I ordered them for all my section editors, and figured I should get one too -- so the head of student publications “presented” it to me and I handed out the others.

This plaque has lived in a box nearly the entire time I’ve owned it. Even when I had space to hang it, I didn’t -- and was I really going to put up a plaque commemorating my college newspaper career? Now, after 20 years in journalism, that just seems a little desperate.

I was reminded of an essay by E.B. White, probably my favorite writer of all time. In “Good-bye to 48th Street,” about moving from his longtime New York apartment and the purging it involved, he puzzled over the same issue:

“All sorts of special problems arise during the days of disposal. Anyone who is willing to put his mind to it can get rid of a chair, say, but what about a trophy? Trophies are like leeches. The ones made of paper, such as a diploma from a school or a college, can be burned if you have the guts to light the match, but the ones made of bronze not only are indestructible but are almost impossible to throw away, because they usually carry your name, and a man doesn’t like to throw away his good name, or even his bad one.”

My plaque did indeed bear my name, quite prominently. In White’s case, he unscrewed his name from the plaque and tossed the plaque itself. But I couldn’t do the same, so I tossed the whole thing, good name and all.

(Photo: Clown in the window of an abandoned bank, Liberty, N.Y., Aug. 2008)

Teaching

During my recent retreat, we ate all our meals oriyoki-style, which means the food was served to us ceremonially in the Zendo and we ate silently from three small bowls. It’s a beautiful, economical way to eat -- we lay out our bowls and utensils, the food is served, we eat, and then we use a spatula and hot water or tea to clean the bowls and pack them up again.

One of the rules of oriyoki is that you eat all your food. You don’t get much, so it’s not difficult. Even if you have a violent personal dislike for something, if it lands in your bowl, you eat it. (I’m not sure what would happen in the case of allergy -- the menu is usually posted, so I suppose you’d want to stay on top of what was being served and intercede before the server put it into your bowl.)

During an oriyoki ceremony one morning, the server was dishing out porridge, and she served me part of the garnish -- an orange flower. I sat looking at this beautiful little blossom in my bowl (marigold? zinnia?) and wondering what I was supposed to do with it.

I surreptitiously caught the eye of the head server, held it up and mouthed the word “edible?” He just shrugged, which wasn’t really helpful.

I watched another guy near me who also got a flower. He set his aside, on the floor. But I didn’t want to have to worry about keeping track of a flower somewhere near my cushion for the rest of the afternoon.

I know there are edible flowers, so finally I just decided that it wouldn’t have been served to me if I couldn’t eat it. So I did. And it was good -- peppery and crisp!

I asked the head cook about it later, and it turns out that it was a marigold and meant to be eaten. The episode was definitely a teaching -- about letting go of ideas, trusting and going with the flow!

(Photo: Flowers (but not marigolds) in the East Village, Aug. 2008)

Hair

Last night I went to see “Hair” in Central Park. What an awesome show! I’ve been a big fan of the music for years, but I knew it solely through Milos Foreman’s 1979 movie version, having never seen the stage show. I never understood why people didn’t like the movie better.

But now I do. The stage production is an entirely different show! The movie adds layers and layers of plot that don’t exist on stage, and it switched around the songs, giving well-known numbers to different characters and taking them out of context. And it altered the ending significantly.

So, anyway, last night’s show was great. During the number “Hair,” the cast streamed into the audience and one dancer bent over my seat to let her hair cascade onto my head -- which is so obviously and completely bald. Funny! (Believe me, I was aware of the superficial irony of my enthusiastic presence at this show.)

Another cast member gave me a flower, which I wore behind my ear. And at the end, a good portion of us in the audience got up on the stage and danced to “Let the Sun Shine In” and “Hair.” Very fun.

But also very touching -- because during the production you can’t help but reflect on the fact that we’ve learned so little over the decades since the 1960s. Here we are again, basically in the same position. As Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, wrote in the program:

“There’s a tragic sensibility at the root of ‘HAIR,’ a deep awareness of the gap between our vision and our achievement, that makes this piece as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. Trapped once again in a war that we were tricked into by politicians, a war the nation has totally lost faith in, with no clear exit strategy and ineffectual resistance, HAIR resonates in 2008 more than we might wish.”

(Photo: Skull-shaped sticker, Sixth Avenue, Aug. 2008)

Deer

The retreat center where I stayed last week is an old Victorian house (much modernized) that overlooks a sloping field, edged by a forest of trees. The house has a big front porch where we would sit between meditation sessions.

On sesshin, reading or talking is discouraged. So rest periods were remarkably peaceful, as several of us sat together on the porch, watching deer and wild turkeys wandering around in the field. It was such an unusual feeling to sit for an hour or two with no agenda, not meditating or talking and not absorbing media into my brain. One afternoon I watched a hawk dive-bombing a turkey, which fought back successfully -- it was pretty amazing.

My family owns similar property in West Virginia -- an old farmhouse purchased in the 1950s by my grandparents, where grandfather would go on weekends to escape the urban confines of Washington, D.C. He ostensibly went there partly to hunt, but apparently didn't shoot much of anything. He mostly sat around and read dime-store paperbacks by the likes of Erle Stanley Gardner.

That house, in a community near Martinsburg called Sleepy Creek, sits above a sloping field bordered by trees. Grandfather often sat on the porch watching over that field. He was a stolid Presbyterian, but it occurred to me on my retreat that he was really having his own Zen moments there, leaving the pressure of city and family behind, living momentarily with only the creatures in the field. He and I were having the same experience, separated by hundreds of miles and several decades. An interesting parallel!

(Photo: Street art, Lower East Side, Aug. 2007)

Retreat

I'm back from my Zen retreat, and happy to be home. Those of you who have never done a sesshin should see my post from last year, which describes the basic arc of the experience. I joked with my teacher that it's a bit like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). At first I was all into the beauty of the silence and the peacefulness; within a few days I was angry at being expected to sit all day on my aching knees, watching my mind desperately trying to entertain itself; I'd say, "If I could have a cup of coffee, I could get through these next three periods of sitting"; eventually I gave in to a kind of resignation. And by then it was over, and as usual, in restrospect it seems pretty remarkable.

It was nice to be utterly disconnected from the outside world. I didn't use a phone, check my e-mail, look at a computer. It was just me in a community of fellow students and our teachers. The weather was beautifully cool, which is a change from previous years, and that helped a lot in terms of physical comfort.

It's nice to be back now, in my own bed with my cat and a good book. I'll relate more about the week over the next few days, after I've had a chance to settle back in a bit more.

I didn't take my camera on retreat, either, so I'll have to improvise on how to illustrate my posts. The photo above is from our Zendo in New York City.