this was a lot of work.

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book.... but the printer and the printing-office boy?
The marriage estate and settlement.... but the body and mind of the bridegroom? also those of the bride?
The panorama of the sea.... but the sea itself?
The well-taken photographs... but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
The fleet of ships of the line and all the modern improvements.... but the craft and pluck of the admiral?
The sky up there.... yet here or next door or across the way?
The saints and sages of history.... but you yourself?
Sermons and creeds and theology.... but the human brain, and what is called reason, and what is called love, and what is called life?

Whitman, Song of Myself (1082-1091)

---------------------------

How is it that a child can flail and scream about something insignificant, and the parents can easily ignore the tantrum, but Mahatma Gandhi can silently refuse food and bring a nation to a halt? How does the placation, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen lend me your ears...." bring about a riot? How do the actions of a small band of soldiers in Thermopylae resound through history?

I saw a performance of So You Think You Can Dance live a few months ago. I was struck by one dancer - a club dancer named Russell. His movements burst forth so that he was all I could see. There were some technical aspects to this phenomenon. His body works well; the parts are integrated, making each movement look fuller. But I have been just as captivated by dancers whose bodies move around the stage like a sack of potatoes. The technical can't explain everything, however I will speak about the technical aspects of integration, trying to get to a deeper meaning.

When the integrated body reaches outwards, the limbs reach to the fullest extent that the body is capable of reaching. The non-integrated body tends to try to reach a little farther, and this is done at the expense of some other part. For instance, when the arm extends forward, an integrated movement would look exactly like you expect. The non-integrated movement would "collapse" or further extend the shoulder, so that it seems to protrude from the natural lie of the body.

Furthermore, in the integrated body, movement flows from the center outwards. I saw a beautiful example of this is Ted Shawn's Death of Adonis. I wish I had a youtube clip to share, but it was off a DVD. His arms were fully extended in 2nd position. He turned his arms and hands upwards to the sky, and you could watch the movement originate in the back and shoulder blades, ripple upwards through the arms, and finally, exultantly, reach the wrists and hands. It gives me chills.

In a still, integrated body, the lines of gravity flow efficiently through the center of gravity and downwards into the earth. This body can relax in a neutral position. The fully relaxed and centered person can move the quickest. Their muscles simply need to fire, and this will result in the desired motion. For most of us who cannot fully relax or hold ourselves well, we need to make all SORTS of compensations. I have seen a series of photos of O-sensei, where he is standing in the midst of four men holding bokken (wooden sword). All are relaxed in the first photo - bokken down. In the second, the bokken rise to strike. O-sensei remains still. In the third, they have reached their peak. Still he does not move. In the last photo, the bokken reach the end of their strike, and he is standing outside the circle - perfectly still.

I believe that to throw a punch, dance, pour a cup of tea is not defined by the action inherent. Some other multitude of factors, mostly unperceived, must lie behind every action. And at the base of this... necessarily the spirit. A great why. For what reason do we perform this action? This fundamental aspect necessarily dictates the end action. It seems to me, however, that we cannot simply purify our spirit. We do not have direct access (and for this reason, nor do we have the ability to rightly judge the actions around us). We have to work backwards through the realm of actions and senses until we come to the heart of ourselves. This is the purpose of training, and also the answer to how certain actions are inherently different from seemingly similar ones.

I am seeking spiritual integration. I don't pretend to know what this really means. I imagine that the zen master's actions are so mystifying, because he acts with an integrated spirit. Indeed how could I ever make sense of the Sermon on the Mount without this? I act like a sack of potatoes. Throwing myself this way and that, and letting one tiny part carry the rest of the body someplace I never intended.

Take that, Niccolo!

"...in the long run of history the end is pre-existing in the means. The means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process."

-1963 speech at Western Michigan University, Martin Luther King, Jr.

pregnant

I think I know what it feels like to go crazy. It's a pregnant frustration. I've seen people dance it; I've heard Kanye rap about it. You don't quite know what's wrong, but somehow the world is playing (or you're playing) the wrong key. This silent grating continues relentlessly. It's like listening to Wagner; there's always that dissonance. Even the resolution has dissonance. Only this version isn't beautiful. How is a man supposed to cope, when he can hardly state what the issue is? I have ferocious ambition. It's consuming.

I fear that this state will never resolve, because I can't find the model I'm looking for. I see no life I want. Everything is a little too much somebody else, not enough me. I look to Warren Buffett, Isadora Duncan, Steve Jobs, Morihei Ueshiba, Lao Tzu, Alcibiades, Rumi, Whitman, countless others. My body shakes, my thought blurs. I don't intend to be a "gentleman philosopher." I'm not reading because I like it. I'm laying groundwork. I'm defining possibility. And yes, I feel like I'm behind some measure of what my life should be. If I could be anything other than this, I would consider it. Maybe.

What is left when you feel a tiger inside? The world feels like a zoo. Only I know that's not what the world really is. The world is a wilderness, therefore I need a paradigm shift. Maybe I'm the zoo. "What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

The shaking continues.

a story of creation

The track ready, the control room clears out. Wayne leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. An array of cigars and Vitamin Waters is strewn across the mixing board in front of him. By now, it's 3:01. In the lobby, Liz brews up a pot of coffee. "This will go on for a while," she says.

A long while. For the next two hours, it's the same eight-bar loop, playing at full volume on nonstop repeat. It's like the hip-hop cell at Guantanamo.

For a long time, he just sits there, listening.

At 3:55, he comes out of the control room and goes over to one of his assistants, a cute Tulane grad named Devin. "Hey," he asks her, "Girl Scouts sell cookies, right?"

"Yep."

"And Boy Scouts don't?"

"Nope."

"Ain't that a bitch." He goes back into the booth.

At 4:09, he emerges again, pouring himself more coffee. (No cream, lots of sugar.) He's rapping now - no words yet, just syllables, a cadence. "Da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da da-da DA da."

By 4:32, the ashtray is filling up, Styrofoam cups multiplying in front of him. He calls Scoob in, spits a couple of bars, and asks him what he thinks. He's getting closer.

At 5:10, Devin, Marley and Scoob are all asleep, but Wayne is coming alive. He's laughing to himself, nodding like he might finally have something. Suddenly, at 5:16, it's go time. He yells to Mike, who races back to the booth, battle stations on a submarine.

"A-ight," Wayne says in the booth. "Lezgo."

It's thrilling to watch the thing take shape. A couple of times he flubs a line, tackles it again. The whole thing is finished in about four minutes. Wayne signals for the playback and sits, eyes closed, listening to himself...


-Feb, 2011 Rolling Stone (1123)

poetry

I am not a poetry buff. I haven't read very many poets. When considering poetry as an abstract whole, I feel vaguely unsettled. The memory of the very few poets I was made to read in school comes back, and I recall mostly unknown vocabulary and unknown sentiments. I have enjoyed Shakespeare and Donne. Rumi and Hafiz are more like spiritual friends than poets to me. I tend to read what falls into my lap, though my screening process is adept. The other day I was in the aisle looking for a book of some sort - now I couldn't tell you what it was. I saw a book of poetry by Melville... Really? He wrote poetry? If I'm forced to answer what my favorite book is, and the sun falls just right, I might tell you The Whale, but I didn't know he wrote poetry. Glancing through the book but not feeling that call, I looked further. My heart sunk inside somewhere: Walt Whitman. There's a poet with whom I am so little versed, yet always seemed discussed in school. The ubiquitous name Leaves of Grass comes to mind, along with a slight memory of lines and lines and lines. No rhyming. No sense. Oh god, my breath gets a little short. But naturally I have to listen to my little voice inside, and I had come across some of his lines recently elsewhere.

I check out the easiest looking book - a really big version of Song of Myself. Hell, the poem is only 44 pages, and I feel a little like I'm reading Jumanji as a kid, so it's ok. I remember my friend's advice to just read - forget all that analysis crap they taught in school. Just read. I can do that.

I just wrote out a line to tell how pleased I am with Mr. Whitman, but blasphemy and cursing probably show how little I've learned from the man. For a taste of the feeling, consider that the book was originally published with no authorship on the front, and only in the 24th page does he clue us in:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly flesh and sensual.... eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist.... no stander above men and women or apart from them.... no more modest than immodest.
- 499-502


Walt puts words, lots of them, to my sentiment that I am the biggest and the smallest of us. I have always felt it to be my due to be able to accomplish anything that anyone else has accomplished, and then more. And why not, I am a man just as they. Of course I've received laughs, cynicism, disbelief, and mostly just a quiet pressure (applied from the deep subconscious) to stop believing such things. So for whatever it's worth, Walt is beautifully filling my heart to the brim. Hey, maybe I can do this poetry stuff. I think the real issue - reading poetry - is having lived a certain extent, and then simply having the vocabulary and mental tenacity to sit down with a poem. When you can discipline yourself, I find that poetry is not some abstract, pedantic verbal expurgation. It is simply a man talking to another.

----------------------------
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

Speech is the twin of my vision.... it is unequal to measure itself.

It provokes me forever,
It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough.... why don't you let it out then?

Come now I will not be tantalized.... you conceive too much of articulation.
- 566-571

sitting

I stayed up all night last week. I sat and sat, getting bored in the darkness. Hoping not to get caught by park rangers wandering Mt. Tabor. I don't think they wander much in the middle of the night. There was no wind in the late hours. It was odd to experience a quiet moment on the hills. The trees stood still for hours on end. Just darkness and then the slowly creeping light. As the sun started to rise - it was a drizzly, grey morning - the light began to fill the dome. Because of the clouds, there was never a moment when the rays burst forth, but each moment became a little lighter. I found myself wondering how I would know the morning when it arrived. (!) At some point, however, it was light enough to see dogs and people walking past me, which I took as my cue.

Reflecting I find myself thinking about the nature of time. I remember those moments of sitting in a classroom watching the rotating minute hand of a clock. It's not that you could actually see the movement of the clock, but through some amalgamation of remembered moments you sensed the movement. Even though, sometimes I really thought I could see that hand move. That's how it felt to watch the sun rise. It occurs to me that maybe this perception of the passage of time contains the secrets I'm looking for. Why would people meditate? Bruce Blair told me about realizing he didn't know when the candles blew out while sitting. This taught him something about awareness.

Perhaps, the passage of time is necessarily a moving and a stillness. I think this is why I feel so disheveled in NYC - there is no stillness. I get wrapped up in all the excitement and energy, and I convince my unbelieving self that to live means motion. But sitting beneath tall trees on a windless night tells a different story. These trees know stillness. I wonder how a 4000 year old tree experiences time. I imagine it's something like I do - the combination of movement and stillness. Is the tree aware of its own growth (probably not). It can, however, certainly mark the passage of time as it grows bigger. What about the fly? Does the fly feel like he moves in fast-forward? Or do we just move in relatively different senses of time? And to the tree, does he feel that his life is so long, or does he experience life and death just as I do? I imagine that the passage of time is really just a subjective occurrence, and that to sit and understand the nature of this most perplexing of things is to know the world.

Inch by inch --
Little snail
Creep up and up Mt. Fuji

To change ourselves is to understand motion and stillness as two aspects of time. Every moment must stand alone, and therefore we must choose how we stand. However as the moments are strung together, our life turns into what we will it. But what a long and slow process it can seem! Maybe that is the deliciousness of it. Maybe we actually derive our power from the possibility of seeing time as a standalone moment. I don't believe St. Exupery when he talks about the lamplighter in Le Petit Prince. He says that the lamplighter lights and puts out his lamp every day and night, but through some twist of fate, his planet spins faster and faster. When the little Prince visits, he is lighting and putting out his lamp once per minute. Because of this, he cannot rest. I think that God has let our rope out much further, taking away such oppression and leaving us with the possibility of a quiet moment that stares into our face, compelling us to know what is.

Einstein said, relativity is the fact that one minute with a hand on a hot stove feels like one hour, and one hour sitting near a pretty girl feels like one minute. If I were really aware, wouldn't each of those moments feel like one minute? I seem to be bouncing about between extremes, and not just in reference to time, but in all my life. Too much salt, too little. Too much body motion, too little. Too much self-deprecation, too little critique. Much of life seems to be found in the swing of the pendulum, whereas I only feel the stopping points. It seems that everything well done follows the Buddha's (or Aristotle's) middle way. The perfect ratio of anything isn't marked by anything. To find this place of perfection then is to train one's self to be sensitive. We start to develop an intuitive sense of what is right - where to go, who to be. To live in time then seems to be a search for this middle way - finding harmony between the stillness and the ever changing.

Nanao, again.

the world of dew
is just the world of dew
and yet... and yet

Inch by inch --
Little snail
Creep up and up Mt. Fuji

Pissing pissing
Down there
an iris blooming

Don't give up the game
skinny frog!
Issa is here

-haiku by Issa, translated by Nanao Sadaki

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When you hear dirty story
wash your ears.
When you see ugly stuff
wash your eyes.
When you get bad thoughts
wash your mind.
and
Keep your feet muddy.

-Nanao