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Dahlia Marie

How d’ya put into action the rehabilitation you refer to? How did you change him?

“I hit him in the mouth.” Such was Nancy, sometimes brutish, mouthy, sassy, stubborn, witty, provocative, other times menacing, but eternally beautiful. As a rule, it was always that beauty that pulled him in, like what happens to fish, swiveling up to the surface of water to be twinkled on by some brassy brilliant tackle. Throw in a dash of mystery and a fistful of danger. And always he lived to regret it. They’d warned him to chill out before taking on a new woman. Even Nancy noticed how he had Dahlia Marie on the brain. Dahlia Marie was that exception to the hurtful rule.

The road through the California desert was, well, hot, burning hot, the kind of heat that turned people into impatient, nasty grumps.

“That rat bastard!” While driving at madwoman’s speed, Nancy repeated that simple iteration, along with the acid grievance, “throwing me to the wolves like that”.

That was her interpretation of what had happened, who knows, but Nancy had a way with the truth, of molding it like Playdoh into any shape or colour she wanted it to be, of giving it an elasticity and flexibility that it didn’t of itself possess. Besides, who but someone faithfully manic could possibly put their trust in someone like Fast Eddie, an Afro Dominican dwarf with gold teeth and a passion for jazz piano, who made a living scaling the walls of island resorts and breaking into rooms at night.

When we arrived in New Orleans, she went searching for him. I trailed after. I was sure I could see Fast Eddie ducking behind pillars when he saw us coming. Fast Eddie would do everything to avoid her, or make a deal. A childhood of living in shacks made of plastic sheeting, wood, reeds and even blanketsgave him the impetus to steal but not to rot in a crumbling sweaty unsanitary grey cement prison cell seriously overpopulated with others of the same underclass.

At night we checked into a hotel, where a moth-eaten clerk explained to us, as though it needed explaining in this town, that there was such a thing as a night person as opposed to a day person. The night person was the one who short-changed you or drove you in a taxi all over the place when your destination was close at hand.

Fast Eddie was a night person, and she wanted her money now.

I had my own troubles. Unbeknownst to Nancy I too was searching…searching for a way to reconcile with Dalhlia Marie, aka as Noketta, aka Little Miss Dynamo aka Ondine Paris, who’d fled here after our break-up.

She’d returned to live with her ex, and on the phone I was begging her to come back to me.

Why, I asked her, about her ex, why the devil would you continue living with someone who would continuously and violently throw you out of bed for not having sex?

He became part of her, of her blood and sinew, of her identity, she replied. And though she was not always sure if she really loved him, she concluded she could not possibly let him go, in spite of several previous attempts. Unfathomable and erratic he was and she was never sure when he would come home. He had a hold on her. Sometimes he would throw such a beam of light, like a warm blanket in the dead of winter, and ask her things about herself that meant a lot. And sometimes surprise her with his self-avowed vulnerability, the way he laid himself bare, like no one else she’d ever known. She loved him for that, and other ways of expressing sweetness and sexiness when he wasn’t an ass. His sister had told her he was to a certain degree autistic; that sometimes he could get himself out to the world, sometimes feel with it, other times positively not, and so what did she expect.

What’ll happen to you if you decide once again to leave, I argued. You have no skills, no trades to fall back on, and you refuse to do menial work for money. What then? She didn’t want to talk about it.

Nightfall groped at him as he made his way back to the hotel room, the sky was violet, and people jostled others on the busy sidewalk, some gyrating in that strange iconic Carnival boogie.

When he opened the door Nancy was lying in bed as naked as the day is long, and the dwarf was seated next to her. For a time, he’d forgotten he was walking on gilded splinters, now undeniable. Naked as she was, there was a core of steel beneath the exterior as she and Fast Eddie fixed their eyes on him.

Eddie broke the spell. “She’s with me now. We made a deal”.

On his way back from New Orleans, the desert sand had spilled onto the road after an exacting wind storm. In the distance, hitchhiking, sitting on a suitcase on the side of the road was a woman.

It was Dahlia Marie.

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Forgive Us Our Trespasses

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I thought everyone had left the table as I headed back into the dining room to pick up the last of the dishes, but he was still sitting there at the far end, staring at his plate. “Is everything OK?” I asked, knowing if I had to ask that it couldn’t be.

“I’m sorry,” he said without looking up. I followed his eyes to where his dinner, mostly uneaten, was swimming in salad dressing. “I thought it was one of those squeeze bottles with the little hole. I’ll buy you some more tomorrow.”

There had been five of us at the table that night enjoying Christmas leftovers, bantering back and forth about the previous night’s holiday feast, the weather, the company, the condition of the roads for their drive home the next day. None of us noticed he’d gone quiet. If we had, we would have seen him trying determinedly to pull bits of lettuce and tomato to the side of his plate to drain them enough to eat. We would have shared stories of our own inept encounters with stupidly designed plastic salad dressing bottles… and it might have eased his pain. But we didn’t notice and one by one, we drifted away, oblivious, to other rooms, leaving him alone with his flooded dinner. My return interrupted him and when he finally did look up what I saw in his eyes humbled me. He was at once a 60 year old man and a 2 year old boy, embarrassed, confused and sorry. I had known this man for more than 40 years. I had known him angry. I had known him irrational. I had known him outraged. I had never known him vulnerable.

We first met when I was 15. According to my teenage diary, I “loved him” intensely for about six weeks until, with the flip of a page I suddenly loved some other boy. Ten years later we met again at a party. I joked with friends years after we divorced that I hadn’t ever expected our marriage to last, given that I’d won him in a Backgammon game and married him for a blender. It was unkind of me to reduce him to that. We’d had what’s called a ‘tumultuous’ marriage, the end result of which was an equally tumultuous divorce. Like many divorces ours was complicated and compounded not only by issues of custody, finance and emotional pain, but also by underlying and, at the time, unrecognized issues of sanity. With four young children affected by every brandishing of our swords, we awkwardly negotiated a shared parenting agreement. For the next 20 years my ex-husband and I lived our lives totally distanced from each other within the same few city blocks. We scheduled who would be at whose place and when, attended separate parent teacher interviews and limited joint ventures to unavoidable crisis. On the surface we treated each other with icy tolerance. Underneath, I feared and despised him. Though he had never been physically violent, his ever-present anger at me flared out of nowhere. During our marriage it kept me isolated from friends and family. During our divorce it fuelled my resentment and cemented my resolve to stay as far away from him as possible.

And thus the distance was maintained, reduced only when one of our children asked me to “please invite daddy”. Birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmas dinners – I was uncomfortable having him over, but the kids loved him; I couldn’t deny them their father. I am no Saint. It took years of therapy and sage counsel to keep me on a path of reason. While I didn’t want to hurt my children any more than I had by getting a divorce I sure didn’t want to have to help maintain or support my ex-husband’s relationship with them.

In spite of my intentional efforts to the contrary, he increasingly accused me of parent alienation. He’d leave letters under my door detailing his beliefs and citing examples of things he thought had been done. In recent years he apologized to the kids, now adults themselves, telling them he never did the things they’d heard about. They told him they’d never heard anything, but he dismissed their objections as further proof. I had no idea.

A couple of years ago, with the kids grown and gone from home, I moved to another province and settled in a beautiful mountain town I’d been to in my youth. Every year at Thanksgiving some version of the kids makes the trip to see me and brings their dad with them.  With the extended physical distance between him and me our relationship had softened. I no longer felt anxious and at times, even relaxed in his company. When I went back to see the kids I often went over to his place for coffee. I thought we’d come through to the other side of something. I was wrong. We were, all of us, in fact, barely stumbling through the door.

Things started to go increasingly and alarmingly awry. Timelines and details jumbled together. Important information, previously ignored, resurfaced. The effects of a tanking economy, provincial budget cuts, skyrocketing rents and lack of family doctors converged and we almost lost him. One day he was who I thought I had always known him to be and the next, on the verge of homelessness, he was finally (though in retrospect, not surprisingly) diagnosed as schizophrenic. His diagnosis was compounded by the additional presence of a brain tumour. Further MRI/CAT scan images also revealed through mapping of damaged brain tissue that he’d been suffering ‘mini’ strokes most of his life, likely since infancy. I remember him telling me during one of our coffee chats that he felt like he had a Harpy sitting on his shoulder. He said if he could ever show it to me, he would. After the diagnosis he did just that, pointing out its shadowy presence on the MRI. Everything suddenly made sense. Made sense? No, so much time had passed; there was no sense to be made of it.

All those years I had dismissed him as an angry alcoholic asshole. All those years I hated him and wished he would disappear and leave me alone. All those years ago the boy I’d crushed on back in high school, the talented writer, the pre-med student, the journalist, the world traveler, the loving father… was already gone. He’s been gone now another 30 years more. I remind myself every time I see him that I didn’t know what I was dealing with – cold comfort for him and me alike. As his capacities diminish I struggle to organize family and help put into place the necessary resources to address his increasing disability. I secretly pay his phone bills. I consciously buy Mental Health awareness stamps from Canada Post. Underneath everything I struggle to come to terms with and accept my culpability.

… sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.

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Book Review – Dreams Laid Down – Poems by Janice Notland (Little White Publishing, 2011)

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Janis writes with the voice of one who has a deep connection with nature. She knows not only each individual tree, but the light which passes through it. Most of the poems in this book were written on or about her land in the Kootenays where she lived for six years before moving to the Okanagan. The book is divided into sections, beginning with “In Praise Of” and followed by “the Wild Within.”  Despite the astute descriptions, I found the first three sections lacking in subtlety and contrast. It was not until the section entitled “Troubles” that the poems began to grab me. In this section the voice acquires an edge, addressing life on the street, the experience of a runaway youth, and the death of lover and family. In the poem entitled “Angel” the author describes  a woman on the street:

“No new ager this

no Rumi that,

no incense and meditation.”

In “the Best of Days,” the experiences of this hitch-hiking teenager alternate with the peace of the later poet. I held my breath as I read.

 “When I clawed my way out of the ditch

night air iced my bruised mouth”

The last poem in the book is entitled “Meeting.” Truly curious, the author follows natural images to a spiritual conclusion, guiding the reader to a satisfying wholeness. If this book initially seems trite, skip ahead. In the course of the book the author matures as a poet and dares to reveal an intriguing contrast in her life experience.

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Ω

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NEWS FROM LINDA CROSFIELD

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Linda Crosfield	Feb 25
to bcc: me

Hi there,

I’m ridiculously proud of this. I was paired with a book artist from Maryland…I had to write a poem based on a picture of her work and she had to create new work based on one of my poems. Here’s what happened!

Linda…they also serve who only sit and read

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Dorjebo was a taxi driver I first met when I rode his cab in Ulsan, South Korea. I was struck by something in his composure and noticed the meditation beads hanging from his rear-view mirror. We began to talk and our talks continued on other days over many cups of sake. Dorjebo was not the name on his taxi licence but a private name he had adopted during travels in Tibet and Japan. Seon is Romanized Korean for Tibetan samten, Japanese zen.

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A VIEW OF TIME & SPACE

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* This Universal Moment

Dorjebo says: In common thinking we assume we will still be alive a moment from now, but in seon we see that we don’t live after any moment but now.

In common thinking we assume we were alive just a moment ago, but in seon we see that we don’t live before the moment we are living now.

The moment we’re living now is the first and last and only moment we can live: seeing this we naturally practice the Way. Forgetting this (as we all do) we fail to practice the Way, regardless of how outwardly enlightened our useless thoughts and deeds may appear to be.

∞

* The Memory of Space

Then what, I ask, is the past?

This is a very old moment, says Dorjebo, 13 billion years, they say, maybe older. And where are those thirteen billion years? Nowhere. Yet their traces are engraved in the three dimensions of space. Every object, whether tree or hand has only three dimensions. But the rings in a tree tell us that it was once much smaller and the wood of the inner rings is decadent. The core may have rotted away. The wrinkles in a hand tell us that it was once larger. The flaking surface skin is dead and we know that the bones beneath are older than they were. So a popular conception says that the tree and the hand we see are the three-dimensional surfaces of a four-dimensional continuum. Three of space and one of time. I would replace time with ‘the memory of space’.

The visible hand is said to be the surface of a 4-D continuum of hands that no longer exist. Where is the hand of the infant you, of the adolescent you, the young adult you? Where is that whole continuum of your past selves? It no longer exists but its former existence can be mentally reconstructed from the memory of space.

We can speak of present forms with some certainty, at least the ones that change slowly, but our reimaginings of the past get fuzzier the further back we try to see because they are only extrapolations from decaying traces in the shifting structures of the present.

We imagine that the past never changes but it’s an extrapolation from traces in the changing media of the present; the traces themselves decay and are replaced by new traces and when all traces of the earliest past are gone it’s replaced by a newer earliest past.

But disappearing evidence is not the only means of knowing the past. Just because a woman can’t remember having sex does not mean that her baby is the result of a virgin birth. Just because a murderer manages to erase all evidence of his crimes does not mean that they never happened. Just because the fossil record is not exhaustively complete does not mean that The Origin of Species is a pipe dream. Because we know the past not only from evidence but also from reasonable inference.

 There’s also something called intuition. It’s right to say that only the present moment of physical form really exists but this moment bears the imprint of a beginningless continuum of moments past. As an entity separate from this moment, the past does not exist but it may be that every detail of this changing moment is subtly imprinted with its vanished shape. Sensitivity to such subtle imprints could be the basis of intuition.

∞

* The Flow & The Arrow of Time

Why do we perceive the world as moving thru time? I ask.

Everything’s in motion, says Dorjebo, and when something moves from A to B we say it has also moved thru time from an earlier state at A to a later state at B. We justify this by saying that it’s now later because the sun is higher or lower in the sky and the clock hands have moved from 5 to 6 but there’s an assumption that the motion of the clock measures the flow of time. What it really measures is the movement of the sun or the rate at which we digest our food or expend our energy and grow sleepy. Clocks measure the comparative rates of changes in and movements thru space but there is nowhere in any of this some stuff called time.

All of these movements and transformations are simultaneous. They are all happening at the same time because there is only one time in which things can happen—now. At the same time they leave traces in their environment, altering the immediate memory of space, including that portion of it that is your brain. The perceived flow of time is really the flow of forms from potential future configurations of the present thru this vivid phase of actual things that are decaying into disappearing remnants and memories that also disappear. Forms are like waves that emerge in the ‘substance’ of space and pass thru those three phases of potential, actual and the phase of impressions in the memory of space.

Why did you put ‘substance’ in quotes?

Because any substance examined turns out to be just forms within forms that are empty of any permanent self-nature.

What about the immutable laws of nature?

There may be things that don’t change for the life of the universe but when the universe disappears so do its laws. Both space and time disappear.
So absolute space is also a myth?
Yes, but it’s easier to kill time first.

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Why does the memory of space change?

Think of memory as a layered ball. The top outer layer is immediate memory. Below that is ‘recent’ memory and way down at the bottom are the ‘oldest’ memories. As immediate memory changes new memories displace recent memories which then displace older memories. So the whole continuum of memory is constantly changing and the imprint of the nonexistent past is more and more weakly preserved as it gets pushed further down. The reason that memories have to move is because there is not enough space in the top layer to contain all the new data and not enough energy to organize it. This applies both to the brain, the earth and the universe because all three are finite in mass/energy and spatial extension.

So earlier states of memory are states of lower energy.

Yes. That’s why the immediate past/present is so vivid. As mental records are pushed down they give up some of the energy that bound them on the surface and as they go down from recent memories to older memories they give up energy again and again. So as memories descend they find less and less energy to bind them and become progressively less coherent. In the human brain, and possibly in space at large, functionally significant memories are preserved at all levels but at the lowest layer insignificant memories are simply digested to provide energy to the layer above. So the entire record of our nonexistent past is not preserved in every detail and probably the universe does not preserve every detail of its nonexistent past either.

So the memory of space is constantly changing all the way down?

Even while it preserves those records of its evolution which are, for one reason or another, necessary or indigestible, he says. (Like the laws of physics, I say.)

Yes, and factors that support the survival of animals or stars.

∞

* The Future of The Present

So we have a description of time that eliminates the famous ‘flow and arrow of time’, I say. The past does not exist except as a record of events that we view as no longer existing. But what of the future. We say the future does not yet exist, so there can obviously be no record of the future.

He adjusts his seat.

Human beings talk about the immediate future and the near and distant future, says Dorjebo. Obviously the immediate potential present is already here in a sense, at least in the sense of probability. If a speeding train is only an inch away from a stalled car, it’s fate is virtually inevitable. A 99.999 percent probability. I think the future is about the shifting calculus of probabilities of change in the composition of immediate space. The immediate potential present is almost 100 % identical to the real present. Just  as immediate memories displace older memories, the immediate potential present displaces older versions of the potential present.

So there’s no need to speak of a ‘future’? 

No it gets replaced by the potential present, which is  like a mirror image of memory and like memory it already exists in the depth of present space. At the lowest energetic levels, where memories are fading and incoherent, they recombine to shape very weak configurations of potential reality. This happens in space at large and also in the brain. Memories reconfigured in the brain are called imagination so these reconfigurations are dim imaginings of reality with almost 0% probability of shaping the real present. Such dim possibilities may die or they may not have enough energy to attract conscious attention but they may attract the attention of the next level up.

When a rising configuration of the possible present reaches nearly 100% probability of forming part of the immediate present it’s  commonly called the immediate future and it’s inseparable from the descending immediate past. It’s like the top of a wave where water is neither rising nor falling and we might as well call it the immediate present. A coalition of configurations cooperate and compete for survival on the vivid crest of the present. And the forms of the immediate potential present displace the forms of the actual into remnants and memories.

∞

* The Disappearing I

It seems to me, I say, that you offer a complete description of how the entire present contains both the future and the past as well as the apparent flow and direction (arrow) of time. The apparent flow of time is really just a movement of impressions in space, and in the brain, from the depths to the surface and back again. The movement from potential to actual is what we commonly call the flow of the future into the present: the movement from actuality to memory is what we commonly call the flow of the present into the past. And If we measure these movements with a clock we may see that they coincide with the movement of the clock hands from one position to another but clocks only measure how fast things move or change in space. They don’t give evidence that there is something called time that has either flow, direction or extension.

We’re silent for a spell then I say I still have a sense that I existed and that I will exist.

Someone like you exists in memory and remnants of him persist in aspects of your form. And you are already leaving them, as you disappear, to someone much like you who is just arriving.

It might help to see space as the cosmic triad of memory, womb and ultimate consumer. Our surface form continually disappears as it is consumed by universal space and it is replaced by a similar but not identical form that continually arrives as it absorbs mass from the food you eat, the water you drink, from universal space.

All of space is memory, consumer and womb. When we see how forms are conserved we see its memory. When we see how forms vanish we see the ultimate consumer. When we see how new forms arise we see space as a womb.

∞

* A Mind Like Space

But what, I ask, is gained from seeing things in this way?

This view eliminates the hypostatized concept of four-dimensional ‘block time’ thru which time travelers go trooping back and forth. We can’t jump into the far future because it’s just a set of dim possibilities and the far past is just a residue of faint traces. If we want to keep the idea of the past as a fourth dimension, it’s mostly empty, nothing in it but imaginary extrapolations from those traces of the past that still exist in the three dimensions of the present. And the further back you look the emptier it gets. Likewise there are no actual things in the fourth dimension of the future, just extrapolations of current trends that get less and less probable the further ahead you look.

So we’re stuck in the present, I say.

That’s like saying your heart is stuck in your chest, says Dorjebo. Granted it could be transplanted into another chest but there are no past or future times into which you could be transplanted.

This view eliminates time and leaves us with the simplicity of space as maintainer, destroyer and creator: like the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, I say. This is like saying that the universe is God.

Emptiness precedes its metaphors, he says.

This description of space as having both a memory and something like an imagination: that’s close to saying that the universe is something like a mind, I say.

Or that the mind is something like space, he says. That’s what you gain (or rather regain): your original mind, a mind like space.

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* The Death of Absolute Space

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What about space? You said that the concept of absolute space is also unreal. At best infinite space is a metaphor for the unknowable source. In reality interexistence is its own womb. At each moment our potentiality becomes our actuality as our actuality becomes our memory. There’s no need to invoke some absolute space beyond the triad of PAM (potentiality actuality memory).

But actuality and memory occupy space, I say.

True, but not absolute space. Just the space between the nucleus and the outer shell of an atom, between molecules, between you and me. There’s no need to posit some kind of space beyond the interuniverse of relative spaces like this.

Like dark energy, I say.

The Daoists talked about a dark source. Einstein said that mass and energy are two modes of the same thing. Mass normally means matter occupying space, but how much space does a calorie occupy?

Quite a bit, I say, patting my belly.

We laugh.

Thing is, he says, energy changes into matter which occupies space but when matter turns into energy that space disappears. So there is no absolute space that’s always present. Or in other words space/spatiality is not the primary form of interexistence.

The primary form, I say. I had a friend who once told me he was looking for the primary form.

Did he ever find it?

I expect so, he meditated for a long, long time.

It seems that the primary form is this triad of potentiality (potential mass or energy) actuality (actual mass or energy) and memory (the tendency of forms to hold their shape until all their mass/energy is gone).

Stones are good at that, I say.

And molecules of dna.

And objects moving thru space tend to keep moving in the same direction, at the same speed. Inertia, I say.

The two constants of form are its tendency to change and its tendency to stay the same.

Progressive and conservative.

So it’s not especially space, I say.

Yeah, if there were no volumes of form in relation to other volumes there would be no need of space, just as if there were no changes that could be compared to other changes there would be no need of time.

And when everything turns into energy, both space and time disappear, I say. How long would that last?

More sake? asked Dorjebo, extending the flask.

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In honour of dharma brother Paul Warwick

and all the rooms in which he continues to breathe.

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Ω

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What It Will Take

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What it will take
Is a resistance to the system that we’ve come to embrace
For no other reason than just because it is
For resistance is to question what we’ve been led to believe
Not necessarily lies, but stories
Stories that have become truths in the synapses of our minds
Bonds so tight that even though we recognize them we still
Can’t break free.
But recognition is where it all begins
When questions and childlike innocence form the stem that grows up and out
Piercing through convention and unimagination
Like the roots of a tree busting through concrete sidewalks and building foundations
The story has an end, like all stories do
But this story ain’t a fairytale
The princess doesn’t get the prince
The frog stays a frog
The witch eats the kids
And this is OK because coming right behind it is something new
Truth, love, honesty, connection, vulnerability
Words that have lost meaning amidst
The six o’clock news, Facebook, and pornography.
These words are on the lips of a new generation
As well as an old generation
Because wisdom has no age limitations
The awakened spirit is not exclusive to an esoteric crowd jockeying for position
They’re on the lips of teachers, doctors, and bus drivers
Construction workers, soldiers, and the unemployed
Those who get scowled at to, “Get a job, hippie!”
And, even if they don’t know it yet, they’re on the lips of
Those who do the scowling.
Because there is no “us” and “them”
Imagine:
Lakes vs. clouds
Flowers vs. mountains
The moon vs. the earth
The separation is causing annihilation
We must reconvene on the scene
Where community is the top priority
And where we stare in each others’ eyes
With understanding and compassion
And fashion for ourselves
A new reality.

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Lessons From Seat 47B

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47B. That’s me. Aisle seat. On a 17-hour flight, I made sure to take an aisle seat.
I was flying from LA to Bangkok and was seated next to a short 50-ish Indian man wearing bright
yellow Bermuda shorts. His eyes sparkled behind big gold-rimmed specs and his moustache stretched
across his face as he smiled.
We didn’t introduce ourselves but we exchanged our stories. He was a business man working in the
textiles industry in Southern India and was returning to Asia after some business meetings in Mexico
and the States. I was a travel writer (although he insisted on calling me a journalist) on my way to
Bangkok.
“There are others of me on this flight, but I’m not even sure who they are. I’ve never met them,” I
told him.
“You know, I’m a business man, but I’m very creative. I write poetry,” he said to me. Unsure what to
do with this information, I smiled, nodded politely, and said something like, “Really? That’s great,”
before pressing play on my headrest movie.
We cut in and out of conversation, enjoying each others company as much as we enjoyed our own
solitude. He was rude to the flight attendants, always making very particular requests as if we were
in first class (“No, I said no ice.”). He also made a noise like a cow every once in a while, which I
later realized was him burping. Once, while I was waiting patiently for the bathroom, he came over
and rapped on the door. When the lady came out and sat back in her seat, I embarrassingly
whispered to her, “just so you know, that wasn’t me who knocked.”
At some point — time means nothing when flying across fourteen time zones — I noticed him writing.
I looked without trying to look like I was looking. At the top of the page was scribbled For Honey
Bee. Words and sentences followed but, respecting his privacy, I turned back to the movie.
Earlier, he’d told me that his wife died three years ago; this poem must be about her, I thought. I refocused
on my movie, Green Zone. While Matt Damon was yelling orders to his men at a weapons-ofmass-
destruction site, I noticed my new friend had stopped writing and was wiping his eyes with a
tissue. Through the sound of gunfire in my earphones I could hear him sobbing. I kept watching.
Later, while Greg Kinnear was sending his Pentagon thugs to kill the Iraqi army general, my seatmate
again paused in his writing, looked out the window and wiped away tears. His sniffling made it
through the noise of a car chase. The movie was reaching its climax.
Somewhere over an ocean, sometime between meals and restless napping, he put his pen down,
picked up the paper, and turned to me. “My sister-in-law, my wife’s elder sister…she died last week.
While I was away on business.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a gas explosion. She must have forgotten to turn off the gas at night, and when she went to
light the stove the next morning…”
He told me her husband smelled something and was trying to tell her when she lit the match. It was
like a scene from a movie. In my head, Matt Damon was playing the husband.
“She was like my elder sister. She helped and supported me when my wife died. She was always
there for me.”
He pushed the paper into my hands and asked me to read his poem. It started on the right half of
the page, had some things crossed out, arrows to change the sequence of some lines, then it
continued on the left half of the page.
“Honeybee. That’s what I called her.”
I was moved. Not only because he chose to share such a personal thing with me, but because of the
pain and suffering he has gone through, first with his wife, now with this. I felt compassion. My
personal relationship issues suddenly seemed so unimportant. Other than the moments of sobbing,
he was remarkably happy. I saw him as a testament to how resilient we can be in the face of tragedy.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him as I handed it back. He smiled that moustache-stretching smile and then
turned to look out the window.
I put my earphones back in and selected another movie.

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-Hello, I said, turning round on a high stool at the busy counter of an even busier bistro in the busy heart of Paris.

- What do you want, she asked with a ‘deer in headlights’ look, followed by a raising of inquisitive doe-like eyes, in a voice well marinated in alcohol.

- I don’t know you from a slug on the street.

- You’re right, I chuckled.

I’d been quietly observing her in the bistro mirror for the last half hour. She was the kind of woman with enough femininity, vitality and sex appeal that I was ready to swear on the bible that at least 6 men in her lifetime had asked to be her next husband if the current one dropped dead. She was chatting in English with a neighbouring gentleman.

A very tired strange looking bag, like a sack of weary laundry, sat at her feet. She did her best to ignore it. Also, at her elbow, was a business card, with the name of Sheik Mohammed Albalak on it.

- Does this card belong to you? I inquired with genuine inquisitiveness.

She hotly turned round from speaking with the man on her left, and frostily tossed a look of impatience smack into my face.

- Yeah. It’s my husband’s business card, if you don’t mind.

Soon the gentleman she’d been chatting with got down from his stool, kissed her on both cheeks, according to the French style and left. She turned round to me again.

- Sorry. I was rude.

- No need.. but your husband, this Sheik Albalak, where did you meet him?

- I met Maurice, that’s what he calls himself in France, in a coffee shop in Cairo.

- Are you Egyptian, I asked.

- Not at all. I’m Croatian born , from the town of Sisacko-Moslavacka, on the border with Bosnia.

- Some day I’d like to visit Croatia, maybe visit your native town. I’m sure it must be as lovely as you.

- You’re not missing anything, trust me. I mean the town. Anyhow I was raised in Cairo where my parents emigrated.

- So, what kind of guy is Sheik Albalak, your husband?

- He needs irrational amounts of personal privacy, wears disguises, wears false moustaches. Otherwise, he’s a really decent guy, and yeah, I married him for his money, if you want to know. My former husband was a smut peddler, but a smut peddler who cared. Only, money ran away from him. He scared it off. We lived in misery.

- So you jumped at the opportunity of marrying a rich Sheik.

She shook her head in disagreement, in a capricious, erratic way, that spoke of too much drink.

- Not at first. I’ve always been very independent. My mother raised me in the tradition that says that a man stands tallest on his knees. You see if you don’t say no to the man the first time he asks you out, he’ll treat you lightly, he’ll leave you for another at the drop of a hat ; so you say no; you say you can’t go out with him. So you wait. You wait till he asks you again, and you hear a pleading in his voice, a kind of wobbling pain, though he tries to cover it up. And then you’ve succeeded; you’ve succeeded in proving to yourself that he truly wants you, and quietly sown a fear in him, that one wrong move, and he’s out the door. And he won’t forget it either.

- I see you don’t take these things lightly; you’ve given them some lingering thought.

- I’m not as independent as I used to be. I’ve had to compromise. My husband’s rich friends are all conservatives. I could if I wanted to, close myself off in a conservative echo chamber, like them. They all reinforce each other’s divorce from reality. It’s not me, but, I admit, I have had to compromise, she uttered slowly and plaintively with a great slow-going sigh.

- Sein oder nicht sein: das ist die Frage ..to be or not to be ..that is the question. Shakespeare…Shakespeare understood everything. I attended a private German run school in Alexandria. In 12 years of school, I fell sick only once.

- Admirable, I kicked in.

- In grade one I contracted an incurable disease from which I’ve never recovered..

- And what was that?

- Boredom. Unutterable boredom. I need excitement, lots of it. And excitement costs money. I’ve already travelled around the world three times with my husband, staying at 5 star hotels. No one is forcing me to live this way. It’s what I choose, but I’ve had to compromise.

Suddenly a car horn began to honk interminably, followed by my companion of conversation leaping off her stool and fiddling in the sack below her. She promptly took out a long voluminous piece of black fabric from the bag and slid it over her head. It was a burqua.

With the car horn blaring out front, she nervously, in a panic, shook my hand. In spite of the speed of things, I was sure I saw a flicker of worried smile break out from the eyes beyond the slit.

The door of a black stretch limousine opened to her. She scurried in. One could see Maurice with his relaxed princely grin graciously helping her into the leather paradise.

At that moment the waiter jolted towards the bistro front door with a book waving in his hand, just as the car sped away. She had forgotten it on the counter. Thinking I was a friend, he turned the book over to me. It was Shakespeare Quotations. I opened it up at the page holding the book mark, and read the one at the top. “The fault is not in our Stars, but in ourselves…” For a moment, I paused.

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The Crumbling Monument

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One of the most exciting moments for Holman was the moment he found a shelf in the library that was loaded with reams of blank paper. He made a fine brush from squirrel hair and began to cook pine sap, water and black stove ash to make a serviceable ink. Soon he began to record his thoughts in a barely legible calligraphy that was gradually becoming more transparent. The most calli calligraphy is invisible, the ink delivering the mind directly to the pine or portrait of a child standing at a balcony on a world.

So he began to record whatever came to mind, sometimes a cloud of conflicting ideas that could not finally agree on a joint statement but were willing to let various voices have their say. Every word had to make its way thru a bath of acidic attention. He found he could simply ignore the critical watcher by paying attention to the motion of the sun so that he could paddle his humble raft of art through the waves of pessimism and despair in a more or less constant direction.

Conflicting ideas can tear the mind in contrary directions. But the strongest ideas are those which value survival more than supremacy and they will find a way to collaborate with opponents who place the same value on survival.

Boredom is of course another possible resolution. Opposing ideas so stalemated that nothing happens. But stalemate only paralyzes the mind for so long. Gradually it loses its fascination with the whole business and leaves the opponents locked in stasis like a crumbling monument to a vanished state of mind. In other words that moment in the library was the moment he began to forget to be bored.

Li Yin brought the broken robot back on the blue toboggan and he could see that she had been weeping. Now she had not only lost an older, feminine companion or a reasonable facsimile of same but she had also lost her music teacher. Whether Mirayeva II was human or not was irrelevant now. She had value to her and Li Yan wanted her back.

The robot had not been that important to Holman but he liked having her extensive library of music which the robot could reproduce verbatim on a real violin, something which no ordinary digital or analog record player could do. He had to admit it was the stuff of science fiction, a genre he had never been fond of since it mostly seemed to be an escape from reality, sometimes disguised as a commentary on said reality.

The robot could also spell him off on the task of reading books to Li Yan. She was reading at a juvenile level now and the books they had been able to find so far did not interest him that much. This was another reason for him to take up writing. He thought he could probably write stories that she would like and which would also advance her vocabulary. But he couldn’t just sit around and write all the time: he had a job to do.

He had worked as a maintenance tech in a robot repair depot so he would have a look at the control panel in Mirayeva’s chest. It was just a matter of cutting a razor thin line along the breast bone then pushing up on a button underneath it. Then a portion of the rib cage sprang open and he considered the battery of lights and switches inside.

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December 8, 2012 05:10 pm

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http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13204-vandana-shiva-everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-in-the-forest
Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
Friday, 07 December 2012 11:26
By Dr Vandana Shiva, Yes! Magazine | Op-Ed

My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests, and India’s forest civilizations.
My involvement in the contemporary ecology movement began with “Chipko,” a nonviolent response to the large-scale deforestation that was taking place in the Himalayan region.  In the 1970s, peasant women from my region in the Garhwal Himalaya had come out in defense of the forests. Logging had led to landslides and floods, and scarcity of water, fodder, and fuel. Since women provide these basic needs, the scarcity meant longer walks for collecting water and firewood, and a heavier burden. Women knew that the real value of forests was not the timber from a dead tree, but the springs and streams, food for their cattle, and fuel for their hearths. The women declared that they would hug the trees, and the loggers would have to kill them before killing the trees. A folk song of that period said:

        
These beautiful oaks and rhododendrons,

        They give us cool water

        Don’t cut these trees

        We have to keep them alive.

In 1973, I had gone to visit my favorite forests and swim in my favorite stream before leaving for Canada to do my Ph.D. But the forests were gone, and the stream was reduced to a trickle.

One of the dramatic Chipko actions took place in the Himalayan village of Adwani in 1977, when a village woman named Bachni Devi led resistance against her own husband, who had obtained a contract to cut trees. When officials arrived at the forest, the women held up lighted lanterns although it was broad daylight. The forester asked them to explain. The women replied, “We have come to teach you forestry.” He retorted, “You foolish women, how can you prevent tree felling by those who know the value of the forest? Do you know what forests bear? They produce profit and resin and timber.”I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement, and I spent every vacation doing pad yatras (walking pilgrimages), documenting the deforestation and the work of the forest activists, and spreading the message of Chipko.The women sang back in chorus:

        What do the forests bear?
        
Soil, water, and pure air.

        Soil, water, and pure air

        Sustain the Earth and all she bears.

Beyond Monocultures
From Chipko, I learned about biodiversity and biodiversity-based living economies; the protection of both has become my life’s mission. As I described in my book Monocultures of the Mind, the failure to understand biodiversity and its many functions is at the root of the impoverishment of nature and culture. Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming that I started in 1987, is spreading. So far, we’ve worked with farmers to set up more than 100 community seed banks across India. We have saved more than 3,000 rice varieties. We also help farmers make a transition from fossil-fuel and chemical-based monocultures to biodiverse ecological systems nourished by the sun and the soil.The lessons I learned about diversity in the Himalayan forests I transferred to the protection of biodiversity on our farms. I started saving seeds from farmers’ fields and then realized we needed a farm for demonstration and training. Thus Navdanya Farm was started in 1994 in the Doon Valley, located in the lower elevation Himalayan region of Uttarakhand Province. Today we conserve and grow 630 varieties of rice, 150 varieties of wheat, and hundreds of other species. We practice and promote a biodiversity-intensive form of farming that produces more food and nutrition per acre. The conservation of biodiversity is therefore also the answer to the food and nutrition crisis.

Biodiversity has been my teacher of abundance and freedom, of cooperation and mutual giving.

Rights of Nature On the Global Stage
When nature is a teacher, we co-create with her: we recognize her agency and her rights. That is why it is significant that Ecuador has recognized the “rights of nature” in its constitution. In April 2011, the United Nations General Assembly­—inspired by the constitution of Ecuador and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth initiated by Bolivia—organized a conference on harmony with nature as part of Earth Day celebrations. Much of the discussion centered on ways to transform systems based on domination of people over nature, men over women, and rich over poor into new systems based on partnership.

Separatism is indeed at the root of disharmony with nature and violence against nature and people. As the prominent South African environmentalist Cormac Cullinan points out, apartheid means separateness. The world joined the anti-apartheid movement to end the violent separation of people on the basis of color. Apartheid in South Africa was put behind us. Today, we need to overcome the wider and deeper apartheid—an eco-apartheid based on the illusion of separateness of humans from nature in our minds and lives.The U.N. secretary general’s report, “Harmony with Nature,” issued in conjunction with the conference, elaborates on the importance of reconnecting with nature: “Ultimately, environmentally destructive behavior is the result of a failure to recognize that human beings are an inseparable part of nature and that we cannot damage it without severely damaging ourselves.”

The Dead-Earth Worldview
The war against the Earth began with this idea of separateness. Its contemporary seeds were sown when the living Earth was transformed into dead matter to facilitate the industrial revolution. Monocultures replaced diversity. “Raw materials” and “dead matter” replaced a vibrant Earth. Terra Nullius (the empty land, ready for occupation regardless of the presence of indigenous peoples) replaced Terra Madre (Mother Earth). This philosophy goes back to Francis Bacon, called the father of modern science, who said that science and the inventions that result do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” Robert Boyle, the famous 17th-century chemist and a governor of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the New England Indians, was clear that he wanted to rid native people of their ideas about nature. He attacked their perception of nature “as a kind of goddess” and argued that “the veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.”

The death-of-nature idea allows a war to be unleashed against the Earth. After all, if the Earth is merely dead matter, then nothing is being killed. As philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant points out, this shift of perspective, from nature as a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter, was well suited to the activities that would lead to capitalism. The domination images created by Bacon and other leaders of the scientific revolution replaced those of the nurturing Earth, removing a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature. “One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body,” Merchant wrote.

What Nature Teaches
Today, at a time of multiple crises intensified by globalization, we need to move away from the paradigm of nature as dead matter. We need to move to an ecological paradigm, and for this, the best teacher is nature herself.

This is the reason I started the Earth University/Bija Vidyapeeth at Navdanya’s farm.  Because the Earth University is located at Navdanya, a biodiversity farm, participants learn to work with living seeds, living soil, and the web of life. Participants include farmers, school children, and people from across the world. Two of our most popular courses are “The A-Z of Organic Farming and Agroecology,” and “Gandhi and Globalization.”The Earth University teaches Earth Democracy, which is the freedom for all species to evolve within the web of life, and the freedom and responsibility of humans, as members of the Earth family, to recognize, protect, and respect the rights of other species. Earth Democracy is a shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. And since we all depend on the Earth, Earth Democracy translates into human rights to food and water, to freedom from hunger and thirst.

The Poetry of the Forest
The Earth University is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s national poet and a Nobel Prize laureate. Tagore started a learning center in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, as a forest school, both to take inspiration from nature and to create an Indian cultural renaissance. The school became a university in 1921, growing into one of India’s most famous centers of learning.

In “The Religion of the Forest,” Tagore wrote about the influence that the forest dwellers of ancient India had on classical Indian literature. The forests are sources of water and the storehouses of a biodiversity that can teach us the lessons of democracy: of leaving space for others while drawing sustenance from the common web of life. Tagore saw unity with nature as the highest stage of human evolution.Today, just as in Tagore’s time, we need to turn to nature and the forest for lessons in freedom. In his essay “Tapovan” (Forest of Purity), Tagore writes: “Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city. India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man. The culture of the forest has fueled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.”

It is this unity in diversity that is the basis of both ecological sustainability and democracy. Diversity without unity becomes the source of conflict and contest. Unity without diversity becomes the ground for external control. This is true of both nature and culture. The forest is a unity in its diversity, and we are united with nature through our relationship with the forest. In Tagore’s writings, the forest was not just the source of knowledge and freedom; it was the source of beauty and joy, of art and aesthetics, of harmony and perfection. It symbolized the universe. In “The Religion of the Forest,” the poet says that our frame of mind “guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.”

The forest teaches us union and compassion. The forest also teaches us enoughness: as a principle of equity, how to enjoy the gifts of nature without exploitation and accumulation. Tagore quotes from the ancient texts written in the forest: “Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through greed of possession.” No species in a forest appropriates the share of another species. Every species sustains itself in cooperation with others.

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living. The conflict between greed and compassion, conquest and cooperation, violence and harmony that Tagore wrote about continues today. And it is the forest that can show us the way beyond this conflict.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food, and assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. She is author of numerous books including,Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The hijacking of the Global food supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.

Submitted by mark mealing.

Used by permission.

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GEORGE

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First it was Garth, the effeminate dog owner who went bananas when George admonished him in his capacity as building manager to scoop up the dog poop on the back lawn; then the schizophrenic on the top floor went into a fury when he was asked to lower his stereo to put a damper on the fire storm of electric guitar squealing bursting through his unit front door. And then he had to hear the man’s usual threat. “Sure, I know who your lawyer is; you’ve told me endless times”, replied George to the man’s yelling, ” actually I forgot , is it God or the Pope?”

But today was different. Today, on his MP3 player, jazz artist, Hank Mobley was miaowing  mellow lines out of a brass Saxophone, and the red sand was hot on his bare bottom, and the pale-skinned beauties on the beach seemed to formally invite him over to examine their astonishingly pink nipples.

Today was different. Today was not the day that Adele promised she would see him next Thursday as long as the sky was pink, her Anglophone unilingual mother phoned speaking Chinese, and her dog broke out singing the aria O Mio Bambino Caro in the Key of B Flat.  George got the picture.

The problem was that George had an over-acute capacity for sadness. Some days the slightest thing could tip the scales. The words of Carl Jung seeped into his brain, “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble”.  Yet he was well aware that he was sometimes the author of his own life’s tribulations.  Why did he have to tell Adele, who is a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist draped in a bulky Puritan frock – tell her as a joke mind you – about his sex life with his former wife.

” You see” said George to an already irritable Adele, “she noticed  there was a  Toronto Dominion Bank flag draped over my erect penis.  I told her every time I sprang an erection and draped a TD flag over it, I got $5 off on every online purchase made with my TD credit card.  All I had to do was take a picture of it, have her sign an affidavit to the effect and send it all off to TD Headquarters.” The joke of course flew like a giant lead balloon.

George had held so many building manager jobs that he hoped one day to be inducted into the Building Managers Hall of Fame but doubted it would happen soon.

Things could be worse was the philosophic exit door he chose to enter to avoid lingering hopelessness.

He could be working as a reporter for a left leaning low income citizens newsletter whose obese female editor alternated between being a socialist commentator and a man-eating shark. Indeed, before turning to the career of building manager, he had actually worked as a writer in Montreal, and Sheilagh, the editor, had been his boss.  “There’s going to be a sit-down demonstration in front of some greedy developer’s office who’s planning to tear down beautiful downtown heritage homes so he can put up some profitable monstrosity. Go cover the story”.

And He did. So close was he to the demonstrators that he got rounded up by the Police with the others, thrown into the paddy wagon and delivered up to Parthenon Street Jail, where police removed his belt and finger-printed him while the line-up of prisoners waited their turn. Next he found himself in a dreary, grey, stone block 19^th century prison cell with four others. And when the police guard refused to come to the aid of someone who had a diabetes attack with no medicine on him, everybody shrieked incessantly and in unison, “HEEEE NEEEEEEEEDS HIIIIS MEDICINE!!” like in the chorus of the Hebrews in Verdi’s opera NABUCCO. At first, George kept quiet but then someone eyed him with menace. After 5 hours, they were let free but having been all charged with trespass and disorderly conduct, they set out to find a lawyer. As almost all were genuinely low income earners, the group was eligible for Legal Aid.

Legal Aid gave them a nationalist Quebecois lawyer who wore the Fleur-De-Lys on his head band. It was the early 1970s; progressive people and hippies wore head bands back then; it was in style. Is it possible that our lawyer is a hippie? George silently queried and cursed at the same time. The happy-go-lucky lawyer explained his tactical plan while insouciantly feeding lazy looking fish in a huge lush fish tank. George saw himself as the feed being sprinkled into the tank, lurched at by muscular jawfish and fat snappers.

At lunch time in the cafeteria of the Palais de Justice (the court house of Montreal), on the day of the first hearing, their motley group of Marxists and anarchists were munching and moping over hot dogs and French frieds and the like. That’s all they could afford.

Allan, the Marxist was going on and on and on quoting directly from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, finishing with ” you see, even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its original source, becomes converted into accumulated capital, capitalized surplus-value..” when suddenly Oreste, who published a national anarchist review, stood up brusquely, drew himself up large, his finely trimmed goatee twitching, a fiery Socrates with a puffed up reddish face, and let loose a window shaking rage, ‘Is there no way of stemming the tide of your verbal diarrhea? Are we all to drown in the bog, in this quicksand of bottomless doctrine?” Suddenly, the cafeteria turned into a hush from its former clamour. All eyes were on their table.  Those at the table escaped somewhere, anywhere inside themselves, whilst Allan shrank into nullity, the entire cafeteria dumb with shock at the fury of the tempest that had just blown over them.

After three nail biting months, the trial came to court, and George, who was too immature to go through something like this, showed up in a mood of undeniable despair.  As it turned out, the lawyer with the Fleur-De-Lys head-band, was brilliant and got them off the hook after three dexterous hours of splendid fact jousting with the Crown Prosecutor.

With the goal of escaping the inescapable, George eventually moved out West. What he got was Garth, the schizophrenic and Adele.