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Happy New Years. I’m continuing to contemplate the path of Shambhala Art and the weekend training with Acharya Arawana Hayashi last year. Specifically, I’m considering the message of “appreciating the nature of things as they are”. The path of dharma art is a way of perceiving the world based on inquisitiveness rather than fear and desire, seeing without pushing away or pulling towards. This way of perceiving is contrasted with a process that colors and edits our world to reinforce the ideology of self.
In a series of four lectures, Professor Christopher Peacocke at University College London discusses the nature of self-representation. Although his own position on self and self-representation doesn’t easily coincide with the view outlined in True Perception, Peacocke’s lectures are a thorough overview of several philosophical theories related to self. The example he uses to analyze his theory is especially revealing:
“That thing is coming towards me.”
According to Peacocke, this statement is self-representation at a level more basic than conceptual representation. Experiencing a ball coming towards “me” doesn’t require a social or cultural context. There is no judgment or reason at that level. Furthermore, the statement is stronger than the type of representation that happens when one sees oneself in a mirror. The process of coloring and editing our world discussed in True Perception can also be illustrated with this example.
On the surface, the statement seems to be a declaration about the “thing” but is actually about the self making the statement. The “thing” is implicated in representing the self. The difference between what the statement seems to say and what it actually says is how the self-representation slips in under the radar, so to speak.
Peacocke offers several possibilities for “that thing”: that ball, that predator, or that friend. The strength of the self-representation is proportional to the strength of the attitude toward the particular thing. The strongest self-representation happens when we perceive a thing we strongly desire or fear. The self-representation weakens as the attitude of desire or fear diminishes; ultimately, a thing that is neither desired or feared, that is wholly inconsequential, is not perceived.
True Perception identifies three types of experiences that reedit our perception. Passion colors our perception; we see what we desire. Or, we reject with aggression, pushing away and avoiding what we don’t want or what we fear. Ignorance, when we don’t know whether to desire or fear a thing, results in a state of panic. All three experiences occur as sub-radar self-representations, such as the example given by Peacocke.
The view of Shambhala Art is not grounded in self-representation but inquisitiveness. The world is not divided into categories motivated by self-representation. Instead, every experience is a phatic message, an absolute symbol of itself:
“That thing is moving in space.”
Habitual self-representation is often overwhelming and difficult to detect. We can’t simply deny what we desire or embrace what we fear without falling further into ignorance. True Perception warns of too much philosophy, and points to meditation practice is a technique for developing this new sight for ourselves. This week I went to a meditation talk at Boulder Shambhala Center, and the speaker addressed this very topic. The instruction was clear:
“Don’t stop passion or aggression or ignorance. Just notice.”
I find appreciating the nature of things as they are extremely difficult, especially when I don’t like how things are. In those moments, I can appreciate the “not liking”, really notice how it feels. It feels good, I’ve noticed, to let myself not like something I don’t like. It reminds me of a quote, attributed to Clarence Darrow:
“I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it I’d eat it, and I just hate it.”
In the second lecture, Peacocke quotes Daniel Dennett on the role narrative has with self-representation:
“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not building dams or spinning webs, but telling stories – and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others, and ourselves, about who we are…”
Bennett’s theory is that we use narrative to construct ourselves, specifically to construct in the minds of others the self we want them to think we are. Self-representation, then, is a useful tool. He compares it to the concept of center of gravity, a useful fiction used by physicists. It would be incorrect to claim there is no self, but it would be correct to say the self doesn’t exist. To quote Roland Barthes in The Pleasures of the Text: “…the subject [self] returns, not as illusion, but as fiction.” Like the physicists’ tool, a self is only useful in some situations; when self-representation becomes the only available tool, our world becomes very small and full of pain. Dennett continues:
“…we (unlike professional human story tellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them; like spiderwebs, our tales are spun but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.
Creative writing has the potential to consciously and deliberately use narrative for other than self-representation when writers are inquisitive about how stories are concocted and how they are told.
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Here are two poems I wrote inspired by leading workshops in schools:
“Where I’m From”, based on an exercise in George Ella Lyon’s “how-to” poetry book:
I’m from fast motorcycles
and old cars rolling over
rolling hills.
I’m from double lines
stretched through burnt desert
and snowy peaks.
I’m from too much TV
and video game calluses.
I’m from get your hands up
and sit your butt down.
I’m from what are you doing
here and
where you think you’re going?
I’m from a pacifying ocean
and an angry book,
my Achilles heel.
The River of Words curriculum integrates the detailed observation of a scientist with the creative passion of an artist.
Stiff-tailed duck
makes a long
ripple, dipping
underwater.
Fish fins flap,
and gills gulp.
In the cattails,
glides the duck.
You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction
Ed. Keith Kachtick, Wisdom Publications Boston 2006
The radical notion of collecting Buddhist fiction presents a sort of koan: Is fiction the Dharma? Is the Dharma fiction? The stories in You Are Not Here, like most anthologies, are hit or miss. The hits are very good, and even the misses offer fine writing and a valuable response to the koan.
The first story, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, concerns an elderly man from Vietnam now living in the US where is children and grandchildren have grown up. His family is still actively anticommunist, but he is being visited by the ghost of his old friend, Ho Chi Minh. There are direct Buddhist references in the narrative, but more importantly the story evokes the contemplative aesthetic:
“This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers…”
Butler uses the sensation of smell, a sense that develops pre-language, in a narrative that exists only as language, mimeticly demonstrating the contemplative experience. Consciousness is not a thing but a process of experiencing. By describing the memory of smells in a kitchen, the fictive quality of the old man’s consciousness is highlighted. He smells sugar but it is a scent that has been gone for decade, it is a scent that is not there. By describing the smell as having “nothing to do with flowers”, the fictive quality of the reader’s consciousness is highlighted. What a reader, so moved by the story, actually smells is the process of consciousness, a scent that is not there.
Any story could be read with a contemplative interpretation, especially within the context of this anthology, but other readings are also possible. Ringworm by Kate Wheeler is explicitly Buddhist and almost entirely set in a Burmese monastery. The writer created a plot mired in capitalist realism. As this Guardian article points out, Western-style Buddhism’s palliative qualities might actually allow the suffering of modern life to continue. This approach sidesteps the destructive quality of the Four Noble Truths, essential to the Buddha’s first teachings. At the conclusion of Ringworm the narrator has left the monastery and is having dinner with her father:
At this dinner he proposed a toast to me and my adventures. I didn’t stop him from filling my glass with French wine… The first drop told me I was capable of anything.
That drop would have brought my kittens back to life; as I drank it, the monastery gates closed behind me. The most rigorous enlightenment system in the world shut me out. Or so I felt that night, not understanding my own rigorousness.
“Here’s to you, too, Dad,” I said, and drank the rest of the glass. I didn’t quite know how I’d go on living, but I knew that I must.
Of course, the wine and the dinner with the father are emblematic of Christianity but also of capitalism. The wine is French wine. The father is Republican. The narrator has returned from her exotic quest in strange lands to live in the heart of the empire, the real world, a world that is both unacceptable and necessary. As Mark Fisher would describe, the means by which the dinner restructures of her social reality back into her father’s world, the cynical distance provided by her contemplative attitude enables the ideology of capitalism to function. Her experiences in the monastery have made her the ultimate cynic, allowing her to simultaneously disavow and consume.
Humans by Dan Zigmond is another explicitly Buddhist story that with contemporary Western themes. The main character is a Zen monk living and working within a overly bureaucratic system indicative of late capitalism. The bureaucracy first gives him enjoyable work and nice places to live, but finally sends him to Malaysia to do the impossible task of teaching meditation to orangutans. Just as with secular capitalist bureaucracies, the impossible task must be monitored by the authority of a Big Other, and the main character is placed in a position of needing to show “a little progress” so the authority will promote him out of the impossible situation. Eventually, both the orangutan and the monk (but not the authority) accepting the task is impossible with a satisfying exchange. Yet, the story concludes before the authority figure arrives giving the reader a sense that the characters languish in a Kafka-like indefinite postponement.
Stylistically the stories in this anthology are varied. Geshe Michael Roach’s parable Meditation is pure meditation instruction. The Tale of THE by Sean Murphy playfully recounts a definite article on the hero’s journey. Several stories engage the theme of mortality and two stories concern the concept of rebirth, specifically. Samsara Suite by Sean Hoade has the feel of flash fiction describing the interactions over millenia of several characters. Ann Carolyn Klein offers a sexist critique of the lama tradition in Tibet in Dream of a Former Life. The narrator’s consciousness chooses to be reborn as a female and encounters unexpected life circumstances. Even when stories in this anthology miss the mark of Buddhist fiction, the writing is good fiction.
More importantly, these stories are culturally and psychologically necessary if the spiritual teachings of Buddhism are to be integrated and lived, rather than merely studied. If students of Dharma only read non-fiction texts, they will be lulled into believing in the finger. These short stories, more effectively than a dozen other manuals and guides, point to the moon because the finger is fiction.
The last few months I have been responding to six principles identified by Acharya Arawana Hayashi during the Shambhala Art Weekend I attended in Boston last spring. In this post I am contemplating the principle of confidence, “…when we are actually creating a work of art there is a sense of total confidence. (True Perception p.2)
In his lecture on Neopragmantism, Professor Fry offers a theory that human language did not originate out of a need to communicate but out of a propensity to scribble doodles and make melodious or rhythmic sounds. Language has come to serve human communication needs, but existed prior to performing that service. This theory on the origin of language is in radical opposition to the often quoted axiom that we write to be read. One version of the axiom, by Leo Rosten, goes:
A writer writes…because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
I’ve quoted Rosten and other writers saying the same thing. The things I believed I was communicating varied: memory, fantasies, ideas, emotions, attitudes, etc. I was deeply convinced that as a writer, my primary purpose was to communicate. It seemed obvious and incontrovertible, a natural and empirical fact, which should have been a red flag. As Alenka Zupančič points out:
…it is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.
Professor Fry makes a compelling argument. Humans can use fire to cook food, but does that mean the purpose of fire is to cook? Cooking is only one of many purposes humans have found for fire, and it continues to exist whether we give it a purpose or not. Humans can live in caves, but is the purpose of a cave to be a home? By analogy, making marks and sounds can be used for communication but that may not be their purpose.
There could have been a human being sitting by a fire and making marks in the dusty floor of a cave. The first mark might have been /, another mark was made, \, two short strokes slanted in different directions. Then maybe this person made those two marks in the same space, X, creating a new mark made of / and \ but different from either one. What was the writer in the cave communicating with any of these marks?
By fire light, this person continued making marks, squiggles and scratches. At some point, a mark something like O might have been made. Perhaps after the marks S and Z were written on top of one another. This person was then able to write, XOXO.
True Perception identifies two types of art, relative symbolism and absolute symbolism. When writing is communicating something, such as a memory, fantasy, idea, emotion, or attitude, the marks are relative symbols because they rely on contextual reference points. Written in the context of a personal letter, XOXO is a relative symbol signifying kisses and hugs.
But this pattern of marks is also an absolute symbol that communicates nothing other the pattern itself. Trungpa uses the phrase, its nature is like the sky to describe absolute symbolism. Applying the analogies Professor Fry used, absolute symbolism is like a fire or like a cave.
At the World Science Festival in 2009, Bobbie McFerrin demonstrated how an audience can quickly recognize musical patterns and create music within that pattern. The scale he uses is the pentatonic scale, an ubiquitous musical scale used in folk music from West Africa to Korea to Scotland. The notes of the pentatonic scale do not themselves communicate any message other than the scale itself. Like a corecursive acronym, such as GNU, an absolute symbol represents itself and communicates phaticly.
These marks are not being made because of a desire to communicate, and yet these marks can communicate. Perhaps, this writing is a manifestation of a base instinct encoded in my human DNA. As Professor Morton explains in a lecture called Beautiful Soul Syndrome, a spider’s web is an expression of its DNA, but it would be a misunderstanding of evolution theory the interpret such expressions of DNA as teleological.
Our lungs evolved from swim bladders in fish. There’s nothing lung-y about a swim bladder, nothing predictive or teleological about it, nothing superior about a lung, nothing metaphorically suggestive of breathing in the swim bladder, and so on. Like history, the more you find out, the more ambiguous things become.
Writing is one of humanity’s most audacious activities. How daring to mark the world! Writing is also as natural as a spider’s web or a beaver’s dam. The approach to art making and art appreciation in True Perception is as a natural phenomena. Because writing is an expression of natural instincts, I don’t need to write with a sense of insecurity or worry, or even with a sense that I am a writer.
…we develop a sense of confidence, confidence that space exists in front of our eyes and that it is not demanding anything. p.23
When I’m engaged in the act of writing, I can tap into that base instinct where the writing space does not demand anything. I don’t need to worry about communicating clearly or even communicating at all. I am only concerned with the marks themselves.
If I choose, I can return (and I often do) to the web I’ve created with a mind toward making the text communicate. That part of my process resembles reading more than it does writing.
The third of six essential points from the Shambhala Art weekend that I’m reviewing can be summarized in this sentence:
“In art, as in life generally, we need to study our craft, develop our skills, and absorb the knowledge and insight passed down by tradition.”
from page 1 of True Perception
The alternative to this approach, Trungpa says, is very “hit or miss”. A novice can pick up a brush and create a profound work of art but only rarely.
I see this to be true when teaching poetry in schools. Visiting second grade classrooms once a week for two months ensures that almost every student will write a great poem. The creative process itself is beautiful for that reason. But these students invariably struggle the way all artists struggle when confronting a blank page or empty canvas or lump of clay. Confidence falters, and fear arises. My role in the classroom is to bolster students’ confidence so that their natural creativity can shine.
The best and most sustainable means of generating confidence is practice. The more someone has a successful creative experience, the more confident he or she will be in the possibility of having more such experiences. In fact, there comes a point when a master artist discovers that the creative experience is available every moment, always.
The two most effective creative practices for writers mastering their craft are (1)writing and (2)reading. My daily writing practice is founded on my journaling (morning pages per Julia Cameron) but also includes writing fiction, poetry, and blogs. My teacher, James Baker Hall, called it priming the pump. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe poets can wait for inspiration but to write fiction you have to write everyday and prime the pump.”
Walter Mosely says the same and makes a comparison with therapy: one can’t expect the same results from a month of therapy sessions as from one four hour session. He explains that the unconscious part of the mind works in between sessions, so the results are much greater than what could come from the conscious mind only. Likewise, the unconscious mind works on the story in between writing sessions, so when the writer returns to the page the unexpected happens.
Creative reading eliminates fear and generates confidence. Generally, I have several books going at one time: something nonfiction, a novel or short story collection, and a book of poems. My nonfiction interests include psychology, religion, critical theory, and philosophy, especially mathematical philosophy. I’ve been using the Poetry App and listening to Writer’s Almanac to find poetry. I also receive short poems from the people I follow at MYKUWorld. I don’t write MYKUs daily, but I do read them.
Occasionally I read online pubs for short stories, but I’m a bit of a Goldilocks. I don’t like stories that are too short, and I don’t like stories that are too long. My preference for online reading is 2000 to 4000 words. For printed text I can appreciate short shorts and long stories, as well as novels. Lately, the advice to re-read has started to sink in. I’m revisiting a novel I read several months ago, this time with a highlighter and pen for note taking.
The practices of creative reading and writing develop two skills necessary to write well: confidence and fearlessness. The process is simple but takes time and dedication. What really has my interest is that the process is the same for learning life skills. The first practice is live responsibly, be present and aware, respond to life. The second practice is connect with teachers and relate to everyone as such. Through both these practices come confidence and fearlessness.
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The first issue of Crescendo City, a Harlem based literary magazine, is available for purchase online.
Editors Katherine Sanders, Julia Guez, Kat Laskowski, Stephen Payne, and Anna Smith have put together a lovely publication that pulls on a broad range of talents around Harlem including:
Matvei Yankelevich, SCOO D FOO, DA BOM!, Ella Veres, Diana Santana, Erin Ehsani, Hilary Vaughn Dobel, Dawn Marie Perry, Dina Montes, Justin Long-Moton, Emily Herzlin, Bob McNeil, Molly Aubry, Nitsa, Annastasha Larsen,
and yours truly.
The first draft of Butterfly Affect was written in Brooklyn several years ago. I was inspired by Anton Chekov’s Gooseberries to frame concentric tellings of a story. Last year, the Harlem Writers’ Circle workshopped the story and provided many helpful insights. I am proud of how it turned out and hope you enjoy.
LORENZ AND MADI were the type of couple everyone likes to have in their extended network. Madi was a school teacher. Lorenz was career minded without being opportunistic. Friday night, he had to work late and caught a cab across town to see her. He typed in her pass code at the building’s front door and took the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor.
To continue reading “Butterfly Affect”, along with many other poems and stories by talented writers, purchase Crescendo City #1 using paypal or visit Innisfree Bookstore in Boulder, CO.
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As I continue my investigation of the principles Shambhala Art, I’m considering this quote from page one of True Perception: Dharma Art:
“…the artist embodies the viewer as well as the creator of the works. Vision is not separate from operation.”
When I sit down to write a first draft, my tendency is to gather my thoughts before putting pen to page. I don’t necessarily workout each sentence ahead of time, although I know some writers who do. I usually have a general shape in mind before I start making marks.
The process is something like this: I listen to my mind, which is at first silent but not quiet. Perhaps what I hear is indistinct murmuring or the wind or the couple across the hall arguing or the couple snuggled on the couch watching a movie of people arguing. I don’t know what I hear or even if I hear anything until thoughts begin to coagulate into harmonies, and then I begin to write. The marks on the page distinguish the aeolian notes and chords from the silence that runs through them.
This process of arising, sensing, and marking is discontinuous. Often I will stop writing (sometimes mid-sentence) until the next thought becomes clear. These are the interesting moments, the silence within thoughts. The most interesting parts of writing and reading are in the gaps.
Brian Kiteley in The 3 A.M. Epiphany describes a writing exercise he calls The Gap. He suggests writing a brief scene of less than 300 words, then skipping to a much later scene with the same characters. The gap between the two scenes is full of richness, the way elision is full of richness in poetry. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the skill of knowing what to leave out and what to include.
The gap is also fundamental to how narrative works. Scott McCloud outlines six different types of transitions in comics and their various affects. The power of these transitions are in the gap between panels, called the gutter in comic books. The gutter is where the viewer and the creator become one.
How do gaps occur? How do I know I’m at a gap? How do I know to stop making marks?
The only way I know is that I’m reading the words as I write them. Again my writing process is one where I’m walking in the dark of my mind, my hands outstretched in search of edges and textures. As my fingers press up against a firm or warm or vibrating thought, I begin to describe, or rather inscribe the feeling of the thought on the page. As I’m writing I am also reading the inscription. I come upon the silence within the text and know I must engage the gap.
Staring into the gap, sitting in the gap, I am both a reader and a writer. I’m creating and reading. As Trungpa also says in True Perception, “…art is still a manual process. Everything has to be manual and realistic.” The act of making art is both material and mystical. There is no way to circumvent the material process of writing/reading, even if there are many varieties and layers of techniques artists can employ.
One of the most useful techniques I’ve developed has an analogy in motorcycling. The accepted wisdom among motorcyclists is that you go where you look. In Proficient Motorcycling, David Hough explains,
We tend to point our vehicles where we are focusing, even if that’s not where we think we’re steering.
On a motorcycle, you can think you are making a turn and ride straight off the road, if you are staring off the road.
Very often, I think I’ve written one story and discover something entirely different on the page. Sometimes this discovery comes a few days after writing the first draft, other times I get a surprise many years later and after multiple drafts. These long term blind spots are likely examples of parapraxis, but the quick and easy ones result from losing focus and staring off the side of the road. I was thinking about the writing I don’t want to make rather than the writing I do want to make. Trying to avoid pitfalls in writing is a sure way to fall into them. Instead, I focus my attention on exemplars of writing that I most enjoy.
The mantra I repeat is “Look to where you want to be.” This can be difficult when I’m on a mountain curve and can’t see the road ahead, but I look that way anyhow.
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I’ve been participating in a Lighthouse Writers Workshop for the past couple of months. The workshop instructor was Erika Krouse. We met each week in a Boulder coffee house to discuss and share our stories.
I always get so much out of workshops. The variegated feedback I receive on my own stories is invaluable, but so is reading and offering feedback to other writers. I learned so much from everyone in this workshop. And most important, the weekly meetings helped keep me thinking about and actively engaged with writing.
As a closing activity, Erika asked us to send her a list of five to ten books that have changed our lives. Below is the list I shared.
I would have included The Art of Happiness and The Words of Gandhi, because these books profoundly changed my life. I could have included Hop on Pop and Frog and Toad, because these books introduced me to the joy of reading stories.
But rather than spiritual texts and sentimental favorites, this is a list of books I continually return to for literary technique. Even if I don’t reread these ten books every time I sit down to write, I recall them in my mind like dropping a bucket down a well.
I might add to this list several titles by Sam Delany, but his books are relatively recent reads for me and its difficult to gauge to what extent these books will change my life, even though I’m pretty sure they have already started.
So, a short list from my canon in chronological order:
- The Bloody Crown of Conan by Robert E. Howard (13yo)
Howard was a master storyteller, and his physical descriptions are superb. But what most intrigued me was the juxtaposition between Howard’s suicide and the indomitable spirit of his characters.
- A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (15yo)
Walter Mosley says every novelist should read poetry to learn how language works. The first poet I seriously studied was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When I dropped out of high school, Ferlinghetti became my lens into literature, connecting me to other poets from Herrick to Whitman to Eliot to Baraka.
- The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker (17yo)
In this sequel to The Color Purple, Walker crafts a story of characters whose lives weave together to create cultural meaning out of individual experience. Reading Walker also led me to the stories of Henry Dumas, another master of personal mythology.
- Do The Right Thing (Screenplay and Commentary) by Spike Lee and Lisa Jones (19yo)
The movie was great, but finding this book was like getting a peak at how the engine works. The book includes the screenplay, story boards, and Lee’s notes on story structure.
- House of Incest by Anais Nin (20yo)
Nin taught me to take my writing seriously even before being published. Her journals are probably the best writing of her generation, but she chose to withhold them from publication until most of the people in them were dead.
- Way Past Cool by Jess Mowry (20yo)
This book showed me that it is possible to write about street life with compassion. Pimps and drug dealers didn’t have to be condemned or exalted but could be written as human beings with all their glory and shame.
- Dubliners by James Joyce (27yo)
I’ve heard that on his deathbed Joyce expressed regret at not pursuing the storytelling he’d begun in this collection. The Dead is arguably the greatest short story ever written in English. Even now I can’t read the end with dry eyes or without a lump in my throat.
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (27yo)
Another book that made me cry, twice. Dostoyevsky creates rich characters and brings them together in dramatic scenes that explode with emotion. Also, the preface described Dostoyevsky’s inspiration for the book coming from a famous painting, which led me to look for inspiration in paintings as well, such as Aya Takano’s superflat style.
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (27yo)
This episodic novel expanded my idea of what a book could express. Erdrich is able to create vivid characters with individual stories while rendering the experience of a whole community.
- Outrageous One Act Plays by Miguel Pinero (30yo)
Like Jess Mowry, Pinero wrote about street life with honest compassion. No one is innocent, but everyone is capable of goodness.
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I will be celebrating Earth Day in Denver this year with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, “Latin America’s greatest living poet”.
And he has Kentucky connections, which are always good to celebrate. Cardenal was a close friend of Thomas Merton monk -poet and lived in Kentucky for several years as a Trappist monk at Gethsemani.
He will be reading from his book The Origin of Species and Other Poems. The title and focus on Darwin’s theory intrigues me. Evolutionary theories, as a way of thinking about the world, have infiltrated so many disciplines. Since I’ve been listening to lectures on ecocriticism, I’m primed for a poetic meditation on this theory of our time.
I’ve been reading from another of Cardenal’s books, Apocalypse and other poems. Ernesto Cardenal poetry moves me and stops me in place, opens me up to the moment of being alive, of what it is to be living now. His PRAYER FOR MARYLIN MONROE is scathing and tender. EPIGRAMS begins with an epigraph from Catullus and recalls that poets mix of love poems and hilarious invectives. In COPLAS ON THE DEATH OF MERTON, the poet laments the passing of his friend and perhaps of a certain era:
But in this life we love only briefly
and feebly
We love or exist only when we stop being
when we die
nakedness of the whole being in order to make love
make love not war
that go to empty into the love
that is life
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I am fasting April 16th and April 17th as part of a community celebration of Cesar Chavez sponsored by Latino Boys Leadership and Inclusive Lafayette.
In 1982 I saw the movie Gandhi. I was so captivated by his life; I went to see the movie several more times and began reading his book of aphorisms and sayings. Even as a 4th grader, I recognized the wisdom of his life and words.
Gandhi’s fasts were a means of self-purification and political protest. As founder of the UFW, Chavez had similar reasons for fasting. Daniel Escalante sent me information about the fast, including this youtube video of first hand accounts of Chavez’s fasting.
It is clear to me that for both these men fasting was a spiritual practice and a nonviolent response to a manifest injustice.
And so, I follow the legacy of Chavez and Gandhi in dedicating my two day fast to heartfelt spiritual purification and to
The millions of men whose liberty is curtailed by the prison system and their families will be on my mind and in my heart during this fast.
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