One last poem, for now, from the vault

A conversation between the ears of God


Stick your Euclidean prick
Where a conversational vortex
Glimmers and shines
Sparkles and whines
Stick your Euclidean prick where
"Dad's (famous) shorthand" system
Mirror of self
Lurks like a beast ready to spring
Lurks like a metaphor wrapped in cliché
Lurks like a recursion beyond order 2
(Hofstadter thinks like this.)
And that's why rhythm should be preserved
For if it breaks
It will lead to a pantheon of apathy (weak: antiphony)
Clutching a bottle I contemplate (...)
Hidden fear of alcoholism just like Daddy G.
Gee: it's great I meant to say grand
Poetry requires honesty, the "one true (garbled) thought."
Imagine zin is zang and yang is zid.
That was a self-quotation, almost.
Appending I must append, tinker and fix
Separate sentences are required
For each prisoner
of language
Beginning a line with prep
Oh. sition. What? That's pretty damn stupid
If you ask me.

Another poem from the vault

Hills in the desert
Staring at the plains
Cacti, ocotillos, sagebrush, creosote, pinyon, nolinas and juniper
Horned lizard, bighorn sheep, fox, lynx, coyote
In the end there is always a reference to sex
A pass, a lookout, a drop-off into a canyon
My family is with me
My mom is about to be diagnosed with MS
I am free in my own world
I am jubilant
I am crazy
I am struggling to connect with another
I see the clouds spilling and breaking over the mountains
and am awed by their beauty
I am composing songs in my head
I am composing elaborate constructions to show enough primes exist
I am getting impaled by cacti
I am a balloon losing contact with the earth, floating away free

A poem from the vault

I must have composed this when I was in grad school:


One must pay attention to form
words.
One must be alert to detect
subtlety.

Two lie together and share
a biological moment
and bask.

One, two
One, two
and through and through
the vorpal blade goes snicker-snack.

One must pay
attention!
To form words one must be
alert!
Two detect subtlety.

On a less serious note

I went to see the Simpsons Movie today. I got a free ticket when I purchased the season 8 DVDs. It was definitely worth it. Very funny. I also got to see some interesting trailers. (By the way, "trailers" seems like a misnomer since they don't trail behind the movie but actually precede it. Perhaps they should be called trawlers as they are trawling for viewers. But I digress.) One was for a movie in the Resident Evil series, which I know nothing about, but involved a virus that turns almost all of humanity into zombies. (It wasn't specified whether they were flesh-eating.) I'll bet I would hate the movie, but seeing the sketch in the trawler was definitely interesting. I'm not really into the horror/scifi genre. I am however a huge fan of intelligent scifi and fantasy. This is almost universally absent among movies, although there are exceptions, but I have read a large number of really good science fiction and fantasy books. (Disclaimer: I have never read, nor do I plan to read, Harry Potter.) I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was younger and absolutely loved the books, but I actually never read the last 30 pages because, subconsciously I think, I didn't want the books to end. I later reread the series, including the last 30 pages, in time to see the Peter Jackson epics. This positioned me uniquely to nitpick every deviation from the book. Something that really bothered me, but apparently no-one else, was the scene in the first movie where the troupe is attempting to cross the mountains through a dangerous pass. They are forced to turn back because the evil wizard Saruman is creating a storm to block the pass. All very well and good, except that in the book, it is the mountain itself, Caradhas, that turns them back. Gandalf uses the incident to explicitly caution against the view that there is only one enemy. In an age when George Bush says "You're either with us or against us," giving voice to a simplistic view of the world where things are divided neatly into two categories, good and evil, I thought that this parable of Tolkien's was very apt. Things are more complicated. Even though the mountain spirit had no stake in the war, no alliance with Saruman, it was being independently belligerent. That's the way things go. I therefore was very unhappy to see Jackson bulldoze over that nuance and recast the incident more toward the George Bush worldview. But in any event, I digress yet again.

An explanation

Soon after posting the previous poem, I heard from a couple of concerned family members wondering what the heck was going on. Basically the poem is a combined lament, using artistic license, arising from two events in my life. Currently my wife is working in Cambridge, Mass, and has been for many weeks. She's coming back pretty soon but I nevertheless miss her. The other circumstance is that a good friend of mine, who was a sponsee of mine in the A.A. fellowship, has stopped coming to meetings and essentially broken off contact. All at once, the two people who I talked with the most, essentially my two best friends, have absented themselves. This gave rise to that poem, which I felt I needed to share. Still, I'm actually doing well, and I don't want anyone to worry about me. :)

A poem

She's gone.
It hurts.
No number of words will change that.
No amount of activity will remove that
From every thought.
I read in a stupid book that we grieve
Not for the ones lost
But for ourselves.
I read in a beautiful prayer
May all beings abide in equanimity
Free from attachment and aversion
That hold some close and others distant.
I held her close and now she's distant.
She's gone.
It hurts.

Life is like a dream

According to my understanding of Buddhist philosophy, appearances are like a dream. But, if appearances are like a dream, why can't I simply crash my car into a tree, since after all, I would only be dreaming it? I think the answer is that, although appearances are illusory, my mind would not be able to carry that awareness through a car crash. My body would be shocked, and my mind would quickly become attached to confused appearances of the world. Moreover, as it is attached to the appearances of this world, it will also be subject to its laws of physics and karma. So I would die, and my mind would be reborn in a lower realm, as that is where the wind of karma would probably blow me, even though that karmic wind is actually an illusion. On the other hand, an enlightened master, when he or she dies, will be able to maintain their awareness through the death process and remain unattached to appearances. Of course, I'll bet most of my readers regard this worldview skeptically. :) A less controversial example of the same phenomenon is sleep. Most of us cannot maintain our awareness when we sleep. However, some people can lucidly dream. In fact, my Buddhist practice has increased my skill in this regard, though it is still rudimentary. Other people can witness their own deep sleep. They experience states where they are aware and present, watching their mind in the deepest phases of sleep. I read about this, and someone I know actually does this sometimes. An realized master, on the other hand, can maintain his or her awareness throughout their sleep.

Baby raccoon!!!

My neighbor just knocked on my door 20 minutes ago to tell me there was a baby raccoon in her backyard, which I went over and watched for several minutes, before doubling back to get my camera. It was determinedly eating bird seed the whole time.

Some pictures from my retreat

The first picture is of the stupa which is on the Monastery's land in Wappinger's Falls, NY. That's the Hudson River in the background. A stupa is a monument which represents the mind of the Buddha. Statues represent the Buddha's body, and dharma texts represent the Buddha's speech.

The second picture is of a turkey, a type of bird that I frequently saw roaming the monastery grounds.

I feel like I owe my small number of readers a fuller explanation of my experience on the retreat, which was incredibly profound, but I've been told that attempting to describe my experiences causes them to solidify into obstacles. So I guess I'll just leave it at that.

Fascinating Article

Here's a neat article about how the laws of physics may be intertwined with consciousness.

We are meant to be here