The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
MARY OLIVER
Monday, January 31, 2022
felt the call
Jane Kenyon
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
JANE KENYON
Chekov
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
ANTON CHEKHOV
lucky work
I have never liked to suggest that writing is grinding, let alone brave work. H. L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he will discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. To be able to sit home and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one’s teeth.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Lazy Stuffed Cabbage
Pressure cook for 4 minutes: cubed potatoes chopped carrots and cloves of fresh garlic and (optional*) onion* + parsnips* in minimal amount of water 1-2 cups depending on the size and style of cooker.
Add cabbage head cut into four six to eight wedges (keep them in tact)
When cooked after 4 minutes, carefully take out cabbage wedges and put on a a platter keeping them together.
Fish out the remaining veggies and place into a bowl. Mash potato garlic carrot onion with potato masher and add some of the pressure cooker liquid + olive oil. Add kosher salt + freshly ground black pepper to your taste.
place the mash on the individual cabbage leaves and roll them up and enjoy.
Add cabbage head cut into four six to eight wedges (keep them in tact)
When cooked after 4 minutes, carefully take out cabbage wedges and put on a a platter keeping them together.
Fish out the remaining veggies and place into a bowl. Mash potato garlic carrot onion with potato masher and add some of the pressure cooker liquid + olive oil. Add kosher salt + freshly ground black pepper to your taste.
place the mash on the individual cabbage leaves and roll them up and enjoy.
Neil Gaiman's Rules
I remember reading an essay by Harlan Ellison in which he pointed to an essay by Robert Heinlein. And they suggested rules for writers. And the rules were how to get published. And I read them, and I believed them, and I have applied them, and they have worked for me.
Rule one. You have to write. If you don't write, nothing will happen. Rule two, you have to finish what you write. If you start it and abandon it, or if you start it and never let it go. You know, I know people who just really want to make something perfect, something never finished. They never let it go. You have to finish.
Rule three, having finished it, you have to send it out into the world to somebody who could publish it. These days of internet that actually broadens your scope, there are so many websites that actually want fiction, want things. But there are also publishers out there. There are agents. You send it out.
And that bit is important. I was talking earlier with Caroline about bravery. There are a lot of things that people know are brave. You know, standing up to an armed robber, definitely brave. Wild dog attack, dealing with it, absolute act of bravery. People don't normally list sending a story out into the world as one of those acts of bravery up there with standing up to armed robbers or wild dog attacks, but really, they really are.
Next rule, Heinlein's was refrain from rewriting except to editorial request. Having sent it out, don't just start it again. Don't keep writing that book, that story, over and over again. Harlan Ellison added a little note on that. He said, unless you feel what the editor has requested would compromise the integrity of your story, in which case, don't touch it, defend it. Also perfectly valid.
The next rule is when it comes back-- because it will probably come back-- you have to send it out again. You can't go, I sent it out to this editor, to this publisher, to this agent, it has come back. My heart is broken. I will never write it again. I will put it away.
Instead, you have to send it out. Somewhere out there, there is somebody so drunk, so desperate, so confused, that they will buy it, and they will publish it. And so you're trying to reach that person. Or perhaps somebody with good enough taste and somebody smart enough. Whoever it is, keep going. Keep sending it out until you reach that person.
And the other rule, which is mine, it wasn't Heinlein's and it wasn't Harlan's, is and then start the next thing. Through this all, start the next thing. When you finish that first thing, and you start the process of sending it out, begin writing the next thing. Because that's the important thing is apart from anything else, when that publisher comes to you and says, we love this novel, but we'd love-- what's the sequel like, you can say, yes. Here is the sequel. I finished that too. And get them even more excited.
Neil Gaiman: A good short story is a magic trick
A good short story is a magic trick, and it's close-up magic. It's not a giant grand illusion where five people go into a box, and the boxes haul up, and then there are fireworks, and then they're gone. It's that thing where somebody shows you that their hands are empty, and then they cover it, and then when they reveal it again, there's a rose that. And you go, how did they do that? Was the rose always there? The rose must have been there.
I once wrote a book of short stories for children. I'm just going to read you my very short introduction.
"When I was young-- and it doesn't really seem that long ago-- I loved books of short stories. Short stories could be read from start to finish in the kinds of times I had available for reading, morning break, or after-lunch nap, or on trains. They'd set up, they'd roll, and they'd take you to a new world, and deliver you safely back to school or back home in half an hour or so."
"Stories you read when you are the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them, or what the story was called. Sometimes, you'll forget precisely what happened. But if a story touches you, it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. Horror stays with you hardest. If it brings a real chill to the back of your neck, if once the story is done, you find yourself closing the book slowly, for fear of disturbing something, and creeping away, then it's there for the rest of time."
"There was a story I read when I was nine that ended with a room covered with snails. I think they were probably man-eating snails, and they were crawling slowly towards someone to eat him. I get the same creeps remembering it now that I did when I read it. Fantasy gets into your bones. There's a curve in a road I sometimes pass, a view of a village on rolling green hills, and behind it, huger, craggier, grayer hills, and in the distance, mountains and mist that I cannot see without remembering reading 'The Lord of the Rings.' The book is somewhere inside me, and that view brings it to the surface."
"And science fiction takes you across the stars and into other times and minds. There's nothing like spending some time inside an alien head to remind us how little divides us, person from person. Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds, and other minds, and other dreams. They're journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner."
"Ive been writing short stories for almost a quarter of a century now. In the beginning, they were a great way to begin to learn my craft as a writer. The hardest thing to do as a young writer is to finish something, and that was what I was learning how to do. These days, most of the things I write are long, long comics, or long books, or long films. And a short story, something that's finished over a weekend or a week, is pure fun."
Yourself
The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself.
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
Hemingway
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Hemingway
Dream
I was wearing a white blouse and leaning int a pool where Sasha Cohen and Jim Watson were standing."Come swimming!" they said. I got leaned into the water and got wet. My top was see-thru. I ran to get a towel for cover.
Our hot water pipe froze we hope it doesn't break. I have no idea how we'd get to fix it
because it's under the house. Prayers to the house god.
A Key
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka
A Monster
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
―
Kafka
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
--Franz Kafka
Poem
To Be a Danger
by C.G. Hanzlice
Just once I'd like to be a danger
To something in this world,
Be hunted by cops
And forced into hiding in the mountains,
Since if they left me on the streets
I'd turn the country around,
Changing everyone's mind with a word.
But I've lived so long a quiet life,
In a world I've made small,
That even my own mind changes slowly.
I'm a danger only to myself,
Like the daydreaming night watchman
Smoking his cigar
Near the dynamite shed.
C.G. Hanzlicek, "To Be a Danger" from The Cave. ©2001.
Sunday
Sunday I woke early eager to shovel while all was quiet. I loved being outside in the cold dry air in the sunshine. The snow was powdery and easy to shovel. After shoveling the back and the front and around the car, I came inside for coffee. Later on after lunch we drove to the north end and walked on the plowed side streets. There were no cars and very few humans. Everyone who lives in that neighborhood owns a snow blower. And had already used them so by the time we arrived it was quiet and full of right angled paths.
When composing a story
“When composing a story, withhold the essential information—do not mention whatever it is that causes the characters to act as they do.”
― The New York Stories
low down
“Bing: You’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy.”
― Butterfield 8
barbarism to decadence
“America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.”
―
Earthbound
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
An invented past can never be used
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
attempting to communicate
When you are writing, you are attempting to communicate an idea to the world. In the first draft, the idea is still expressed in your own private language. It takes many revisions to clarify what you are really trying to say. As an editor, these are the notes I find myself scribbling in the margins of so many manuscripts: Clarify. Don’t get this. What does this mean? The language must be put through the wringer, over and over and over, so that when a reader finally picks up the book, they can say: I know exactly what she means.
ANNA PITONIAK
the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals
Sometimes one sees in the school simply the instrument for transferring a certain maximum quantity of knowledge to the growing generation. But that’s not right. Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living. It should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the Commonwealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual becomes a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. A community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community with no scope for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/sobla/teaching/On_Education_Einstein.pdf
Sunday, January 30, 2022
snow on the bedroom floor
The BLIZZARD winds blew the snow into the house and I found snow on the bedroom floor.
Tolstoy
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.
LEO TOLSTOY
City Cow in my dreams
Wanna share a cow with me? I'm joking but I love the idea!
https://www.acreagelife.com/hobby-farming/miniature-jerseys-a-breed-profile
Snow Shoveling Etiquette
I am blown away that folks shovel themselves out by blocking someone else in. Or they snow blow into the street when the plows just cleared the road!
Why I love shoveling snow
Why I love shoveling snow and why I can appreciate its zen qualities:
1. I love being outside in the cold and being active. It reminds me of skiing, since my heart is pounding and I’m enjoying the outdoors.
2. You work hard, and you can see the immediate results of your efforts. There is something so satisfying to look out and see a freshly cleared driveway.
3. My mind goes into a meditative state. As a matter of fact, this blog post was mentally composed while I was shoveling.
source
run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library
Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about control about who is snapping the whip, who is saying no, and who is saying go. Censorship's bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don't want just to make sure it's kept from my kid; I want to make sure it's kept from your kid, as well, and all the kids. This bit of intellectual arrogance, undemocratic and as old as time, is best expressed this way: "If it's bad for me and my family, it's bad for everyone's family."
Yet when books are run out of school classrooms and even out of school libraries as a result of this idea, I'm never much disturbed not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher . . . which I used to be. What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.”
―
Tobias Wolff
I recall that my workshop leaders were tactful in their ways of acquainting me with my shortcomings as a writer. So much so that I hardly realized they were doing it. I want always to keep that sort of thing in mind when I'm teaching. The way you get better in everything in this life is to make mistakes. Otherwise you're probably doing it right by accident. But you have to do everything wrong before you can really start with some authority to do it right.
TOBIAS WOLFF
KATHERINE HEINY
I still get rejections all the time. In a way, it’s hard because a short story is so personal, and you send it off into the world and hope it does well. But it’s all so subjective. I always figure if one editor didn’t like a story, some other editor will. You can’t take it personally, because it would be too easy to just stop submitting, and then where would you be?
KATHERINE HEINY
a woman with turquoise hair came out screaming at her dog
I have a panic about being able to get out of my house. I shoveled front and back during yesterdays blizzard and this morning I went over the 4 inches that had fallen since. Luckily it was powdery snow and nobody was up. Until a woman with turquoise hair came out screaming at her dog shouting his middle name with emphasis as angry mothers do, as if it could understand English. This is the woman whose husband was getting into fistfights with the father of the three young neighbor boys and the police had to intervene. And this is the woman whose voice is so harsh it's like chewing on tin foil. This is the woman whose disturbed nine year old son was setting fires in the neighborhood. No wonder she can't control her dog.
Strange
This morning I was remembering a woman inviting me to a party to celebrate her renovated bathroom. She lived an hour away. "Pot luck!" At the bottom of the invitation it said. "I'll provide silverware and seltzer water." I thought that was the strangest party invitation ever. I stayed home, as introverts prefer to do.
Saturday, January 29, 2022
Franz Kafka
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
FRANZ KAFKA
Anne Carson
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON
F. Scott Fitzgerald
You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Film mogul Samuel Goldwyn once famously said: "If you have a message, send a telegram."
Tweeting is like sending out cool telegrams to your friends once a week.
Tom Hanks
I remember I had an actor friend - a close friend from college - Anthony Zerbe. He sent me a telegram before I started my first movie, 'Cisco Pike.' It said, 'Have a good time. Ignore the camera.' That was the extent of my training.
Kris Kristofferson
A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words.
George Ade, playwright
what a person needs is someone to be present
It’s okay not to know what to do or to get it wrong sometimes—I certainly do! What’s not okay is allowing self-doubt to get in the way of helping someone in need.
My former paralysis was based on the mistaken belief that someone in crisis needed me to fix whatever was wrong with them. People don’t want or need fixing. Most often what a person needs is someone to be present, to hear and acknowledge their experience non-judgmentally.
As Fran expressed it recently, “Understanding friends help me integrate in a healthy way.” Of course, there are times when practical help is appropriate, or where intervention is both wanted and imperative. A friend messaged me recently. She’d taken an overdose and needed me to phone for an ambulance. I got her details, called the emergency services, and stayed online with her until the ambulance crew arrived. Another friend posted on social media that she was feeling suicidal. I messaged her and we chatted for a couple of hours. Did it fix things? Of course not. Did it help her in the moment? I believe so. Martin Baker
Martin Baker
I’ve learned that the words we use out loud and in our internal mental dialogues matter. I cannot talk Fran down from mania or out of depression, but I can help identify and counter words and thinking that keeps her trapped in unhealthy patterns. Such reframing helps her find new ways forward. Certain sayings remind us of the lessons we’ve learned in the past and support healthy choices in the present. “One step at a time” and “Baby steps are steps too” are two of our favorites. They help when Fran is struggling and feeling overwhelmed. Other phrases such as “It’s not working” serve as red flags, alerting us to the possible onset of a mood episode (in this case, depression.)
Martin Baker
Witness Trees
To truly protect trees, we need to make a profound paradigm shift that transcends politics. We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future.
It’s dumbfounding to consider how long native trees can live if they manage to avoid an encounter with a chain saw or an alien microbe. There are living “witness trees,” as they are called, that stood watch over every important event in post-colonial American history. The doomed black walnut was a sapling in the Ohio woods while Washington was crossing the Delaware. Last month, a white pine fell in upstate New York that had stood since 1675, the year one of the accusers during the Salem witch trials was born. I know this because Susan Orlean just wrote the pine tree’s obituary for The New Yorker.
Her impulse to eulogize a tree should tell us something about what trees really are. They are living, breathing beings. They created the very air we breathe, and they are creating it still.
Friday, January 28, 2022
8am tomorrow morning until at least 8pm tomorrow night
"Rhode Island has issued a state of emergency for the coming storm. Gov. McKee had issued a travel ban from 8am tomorrow morning until at least 8pm tomorrow night. Make sure your phones are charged, batteries in flashlights, plenty of warm clothes and blankets in case of power outages and stay home safe and warm."
update: Travel ban extended to MIDNIGHT!
Luckily the snow is powdery.
Observe
At 4:30 AM I took Romeo pup out to pee and I noticed a strange car in the hot-spot. The interior light was on and there was a man sitting in the driver's seat. I fed Romeo and then brought him back out to poop as is the routine. The guy was still there. I went back inside and told Bill about the guy in the car and that I was concerned and might call the police. Then I looked out the 2nd floor window with binoculars and saw the driver up close; a shaggy haired guy rolling his head around. What's going on? Could he be overdosing? I noticed the car was still running and the windows were fogging up. I looked again. This time his head was facing down with crazy hair everywhere. I phoned dispatch and explained what I saw and what I was afraid it might be. Three officers showed up using flashlights. They handcuffed the driver and had him sit on the ground while they searched his car taking a few things out and then they had him stand so they could pat down his pant legs and jacket pockets. And I went off to the pool. And that was the start of my day.
Blizzard-Prep Cooking
I'm not hungry today from taking sinus medicine but I'm fast soaking a pound of red kidney beans (5 minute boil and 1 hour soak then an 18 minute pressure cook) and I just rinsed a multigrain mix (rice, rye, oats, barley, sunflower) to cook as a base for stir-fried vegetables.
Four pounds of dough are incubating in the foyer in two plastic buckets to bake tonight or tomorrow. I told my swim pals if they lose electricity to come over and I'll feed them.
Do I make garlic mashed potatoes, bread, or homemade pasta and sauce. Blizzard (to me) means cooking and baking.
Last Night
Last night my husband said he needed to put air in the tires. Normally he uses a bicycle pump and fills the tires himself. "Why not go to Murphy's and get some air, it's so cold out, and you're a regular customer, " I said. He took off and came back ten minutes later. "One tire was really low but the rest were good."
"Let's go downtown, I need to mail a card and return a library book and we can walk Romeo."
"I can't find my gloves," Bill said. We went out without them.
"I know where they are," Bill said, "they were on the hood of the car from when I was filling the tire. I forgot and they must've fallen off."
It was cold and dark out and we decided to go to bed rather than go out and look for the gloves.
Today on my walk home I remembered the missing gloves and so I took a detour with Romeo to walk by Murphy's and see if I saw the gloves in the street. I saw one glove and crossed the traffic and saw the other in the gutter. I picked them up, smiling the whole way home. I just washed them and hung them up next to the boiler to dry. I hope they will be dry by the time he gets home.
Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. ― Dōgen
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”―
“Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.”
―“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”
―“A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.”
― How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment“Forgetting oneself is opening oneself”
―“Prefer to be defeated in the presence of the wise than to excel among fools.”
―“Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”
―“No matter how bad a state of mind you may get into, if you keep strong and hold out, eventually the floating clouds must vanish and the withering wind must cease.”
―“If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.”
―“There is a simple way to become buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else.”
― Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen“To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.”
― A Primer Of Soto Zen“When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine many things with a confused mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. But when you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that there is nothing that has unchanging self.”
―“Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')”
―“It's too late to be ready.”
―“Nothing can be gained by extensive study and wide reading. Give them up immediately.”
― A Primer Of Soto Zen“do not view mountains from the scale of human thought”
―“If you study a lot because you are worried that others will think badly of you for being ignorant and you'll feel stupid, this is a serious mistake.”
―“One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.”
― A Primer Of Soto Zen“In a snowfall that covers the winter grass a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear.”
―“Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,
Without looking for the traces I may have left;
A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home;
Hearing this, I tilt my head to see
Who has told me to turn back;
But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.”
―“What you think in your own mind to be good, or what people of the world think is good, is not necessarily good.”
―“To enter the Buddha Way is to stop discriminating between good and evil and to cast aside the mind that says this is good and that is bad.”
― A Primer Of Soto Zen“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
―“The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it. Once its heart is grasped, you are like the dragon when he gains the water, like the tiger when she enters the mountain. For you must know that just there (in zazen) the right Dharma is manifesting itself and that, from the first, dullness and distraction are struck aside.”
―“Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”
―“Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves.”
― A Primer Of Soto Zen“Only those who have the great capacity of genuine trust can enter this realm [the realm of the buddhas]. Those who have no trust are unable to accept it, however much they hear it.”
― Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation“Know that the true dharma emerges of itself [during the practice of zazen], clearing away hindrances and distractions.”
―“You should not be esteemed by others if you have no real inner virtue. People here in Japan esteem others on the basis of outward appearances, without knowing anything about real inner virtue; so students lacking the spirit of the Way are dragged down into bad habits and become subject to temptation.”
―
Anthony Fauci is up against more than a virus
Two years into the pandemic, the threats and vitriol have not stopped. And the many Americans who still trust him are exhausted.
Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president. (Stephen Voss for The Washington Post) “I mean, isn’t it amazing?” the doctor says. “Here I am, with cameras around my house.”
The house is modest for Washington: stucco and brick, cozy and cramped. No obvious tokens of celebrity or esteem. Icicles on the dormant hot tub out back. Bottles of red wine and olive oil on the kitchen counter.
“It’s messy because, as you know, in covid times, nobody comes over. So nobody cares.”
People are coming by outside, though. They are snapping photos. Two years into the pandemic Anthony Fauci remains the face of America’s covid response, and on this cold Saturday in January thousands of marchers are descending on the capital to rally against vaccine mandates. Are some of them staking out his home?
The security agents “usually leave at a certain time,” the doctor says. “But tonight they’re going to sleep in our guest room.”
Year 3 of covid times. Nearly 900,000 Americans are dead. An average of 2,000 (mostly unvaccinated) Americans are dying every day now, even though there is a simple measure to limit such suffering — made possible in large part by the Vaccine Research Center founded under Fauci. And yet many Americans would rather take their chances with a virus than a vaccine, because there’s more than just a virus going around. There’s something else in the air. Symptoms include rage, delusion, opportunism and extreme behavior — like comparing Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (as Lara Logan did on Fox News in November), or setting out for Washington with an AR-15 and a kill list of “evil” targets that included Fauci (as a California man did last month).
“Surrealistic,” the doctor says.
He has not had a day off since the beginning. “I would say I’m in a state of chronic exhaustion.” He quickly adds: “But it’s not exhaustion that’s interfering with my function.” He is a precise man whose tour in the information war has made him extra-vigilant about his words. “I can just see, you know, Laura Ingraham: ‘He’s exhausted! Get rid of him!’”
Fauci has been a doctor and public servant for more than 50 years. He’s been the country’s top expert on infectious diseases under seven U.S. presidents. George H.W. Bush once called him his personal hero. Under George W. Bush, Fauci became an architect of an AIDS-relief program that has, according to the U.S. government, saved 21 million lives around the world.
He knows how a virus works. He knows how Washington works. He thought he knew how people worked, too — even ones who called him a murderer, as AIDS activists did decades ago because they felt left for dead by a neglectful government. Back then the angry people were motivated by truth and science. Fauci had something to learn from them, and they had something to learn from him. The shared mission was pursuing facts and saving lives. Fear and uncertainty could be eased by data and collaboration. Combatants, however scared or passionate, shared a reality.
Now?
“There is no truth,” Fauci says, for effect. “There is no fact.” People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, Internet trolls and even elected leaders. Fauci is unnerved by “the almost incomprehensible culture of lies” that has spread among the populace, infected major organs of the government, manifested as ghastly threats against him and his family. His office staff, normally focused on communicating science to the public, has been conscripted into skirmishes over conspiracy theories and misinformation.
“It is very, very upending to live through this,” Fauci says, seated at his kitchen table in the midwinter light. He pauses. “I’m trying to get the right word for it.” He is examining himself now, at 81, in the shadow of the past two years. “It has shaken me a bit.”
The way he can comprehend the situation is in the context of the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the Capitol. There it was, on live TV, an experiment as clear as day: The abandonment of truth has seismic consequences.
Something has been replicating in the American mind. It is not microbial. It cannot be detected by nasal swab. To treat an affliction, you must first identify it. But you can’t slide a whole country into an MRI machine.
“There’s no diagnosis for this,” Fauci says. “I don’t know what is going on.”
A virus is a terrifying force that hijacks civilization. A bureaucracy, intricate yet imperfect, is what we have to take back control. For better and worse, Fauci became the personification of both. He has been sainted and satanized over the past two years, since he first fact-checked President Donald Trump. His inbox is a cascade of hosannas and go-to-hells. His days often start at 5 a.m. His nights are fitful. What more could he have done today? What fresh horror awaits tomorrow? He is fighting for a best-case scenario, urging preparation for the worst, and fretting that nothing will ever be good enough.
“I do worry about him,” says Francis Collins, until recently the director of the National Institutes of Health. “He’s incredibly frustrated” by the attacks “because it’s a distraction. But there is no part of Tony Fauci that’s ready to give up on a problem just because it’s hard.”
“Being two years into this, and being at the tip of the spear — it takes a certain person to be able to persevere through that,” says Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s almost like asking someone to run a marathon every day of their life.”
“He’s always had complete bipartisan support, up until covid,” says AIDS activist Peter Staley, who once picketed NIH and is now a dear friend of Fauci’s. “It’s flat-Earth time. Nothing makes sense. This is a guy who tries to let science dictate what he says and does. Now they’re turning what is a pristine record into something evil. They lie, and repeat the lie 100 times until people think it’s true.”
Staley calls Fauci multiple times a week to check in, ask him how he’s doing, discuss the covid response and the resistance to it.
“What do I tell him?” Staley says. “What kind of advice do I give him to win that war? It’s very frustrating. It’s almost unwinnable.”
Look at Fauci’s Jan. 11 appearance before the Senate Health Committee. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) chided Fauci and other officials for spreading “skepticism and mass confusion” with mixed messaging on covid guidelines. A harsh but fair criticism. Then two senators — who each happen to have medical degrees — got personal.
“You are the lead architect for the response from the government, and now 800,000 people have died,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Fauci scolded Paul that such an “irresponsible” statement “kindles the crazies.” “I have threats upon my life, harassments of my family,” Fauci said, suggesting that the California man targeted him because he “thinks that maybe I’m killing people.”
For years, Fauci had joked that his personal philosophy comes from “The Godfather”: “It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.” The business is science. Science helped him cure vasculitis. Science helped him and others transform HIV from a death sentence to a condition managed by a pill.
What he was facing now felt like it had nothing to do with science.
Later in the hearing, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) displayed a giant prop paycheck depicting Fauci’s $400,000-plus salary. Marshall accused Fauci and “Big Tech” of hiding his financial investments, which created an “appearance that maybe some shenanigans are going on.”
Fauci, bewildered and incensed, replied that his assets, which he had disclosed for decades, were available to the public. (While this statement was technically true, his disclosures were not just a Google search away; after the hearing, Marshall’s office requested and received the documents from NIH, then declared that Fauci “lied” about the ease of their availability.)
When Marshall finished his questioning, Fauci let his frustration get the better of him. “What a moron,” he muttered to himself, not intending it for the microphone.
What was going on here? Senators were “trying to troll Fauci, and they’re trying to bring him down to their level,” says Matthew Sheffield, a former conservative activist who now runs a political commentary website called Flux.community. “They know if they can get him to call people a moron, or engage in pettiness the way that they engage in pettiness constantly — if he does it even once, then it’s a victory for them.”
Paul disputes this characterization and claims that Fauci deserves “some culpability” for the pandemic because a grant from his agency funded research in a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus was first detected (the exact origins of the virus remain unknown, though scientific consensus points to an animal-to-human transfer).
Marshall’s office did not have comment on Sheffield’s theory. After the hearing, the senator’s campaign website did start selling $29 T-shirts, featuring the doctor’s likeness, to commemorate the moment: “Send Fauci a message by getting your own ‘MORON’ t-shirt!”
The way in which the United States funds and manages science provides a solid foundation for skepticism and conspiracy, says University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who studies science communication and misinformation.
Yes, scientific recommendations change based on available data, a truth that can be exploited to make responsible leaders appear inconsistent or incompetent.
Yes, Fauci has a high salary by government standards, has been in the same unelected position for 38 years and oversees a budget of $6 billion that flows into grants; those are truths on which a distrusting person could build a theory about corruption, unaccountable elites and a nefarious flow of money from this or that institution to this or that lab.
Yes, the virus seems unaccountable to our best efforts and fueled by our worst instincts. Yes, the ways it has ended and upended people’s lives has been undeserved, tragic, crazy-making. These are scary truths that you can neutralize with a fantasy about how a single human villain is to blame.
The attacks and misinformation seem to be having an effect. Confidence in Fauci is softening, according to polling conducted since April by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. After holding steady last summer and autumn, the percentage of Americans who are confident that Fauci provides trustworthy information about covid-19 is down six points since April, from 71 to 65 percent.
“For the first time in my lifetime — and I am an elderly woman — the voice that speaks on behalf of the best available knowledge in science has weathered sustained attack,” says Jamieson, director of the policy center. “Confidence [in Fauci] remains high despite that attack, but the erosion is worrisome.”
With Trump long gone from the White House and public exhaustion with precautions surging alongside the omicron variant, Fauci may now be more useful to the pundits who need a villain than those who need a hero. “Fauci must go,” the editors of the conservative National Review demanded this month. “I’m over covid,” talk-show host Bill Maher told Deadline before his show last week. His guest, author Bari Weiss, echoed the frustration of millions: We were told “you get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven’t gotten back to normal.”
“The stalwart Fauci was the wise Oracle of Delphi to then-President Donald Trump’s babbling brook about household bleach as an injectable, anti-viral agent,” Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote this week.
“Maybe it’s my imagination,” she continued, “but Fauci appears less confident of late, perhaps weary of his own voice and exhausted by two years of on-camera appearances.”
Sen. Marshall exaggerated this erosion during the Jan. 11 hearing. “You’ve lost your reputation,” he told Fauci, adding: “The American people don’t trust the words coming out of your mouth.”
“That’s a real distortion of the reality,” Fauci answered.
Marshall replied with a truth from the world outside of medical science: “Perception is reality.”
Fauci is not naive. He gets that a third of the country won’t hear him. He still understands Washington enough to see how it is deteriorating in new and disturbing ways, as fringe thinking spreads to the central organs. As Peter Staley puts it: “Because one party has turned so anti-science, Tony’s power is no longer stable.”
Yet Fauci still thinks he is an effective messenger. And he still hasn’t totally given up on the people who are making his life miserable. After the exchange with Marshall, and a news cycle dominated by “moron” instead of “omicron,” Fauci told his own incredulous staff: Maybe the senator has a point. Maybe my financial investments, though disclosed and available, should be much easier to see.
As for the citizens who wish him harm, he can’t help but search for some signal, some symptom, that could help him understand.
“I’m always looking for the good in people, that kernel of something that’s positive,” Fauci says. “And it’s tough to imagine that that many people are bad people. And, I mean, it’s just — has something been smoldering in their lives? Something that’s sociologically evasive to me?”
He wonders: Does their resentment indicate an underlying issue that needs — for lack of a better term — healing?
“Maybe it’s pain that they’re feeling, that’s driving it?” he says, as if bedside with a patient. “And we’re focusing on the aberrancy of their actions, but we really are not fully appreciating that maybe they’re suffering. And they’re rebelling against a failing of society, maybe, to address some of their needs. Maybe we need, as a nation, to address the fundamental issues that are getting, you know, tens of millions of people to feel a certain way.”
On Sunday, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, thousands of people rallied against vaccine mandates. Fauci’s name was scrawled on many signs. The rhetoric was familiar. “Dr. Fauci is the new Jeff Mengele from World War II,” said a Long Island construction worker named Gio Nicolson, who described Fauci as both “puppet” and “dictator.” A 57-year-old woman named Robin Field drove three hours from Yorktown, Va., to hold up a homemade sign that depicted Fauci’s decapitated head in a noose, under the words “HANG EM HIGH.”
Fauci is guilty of treason, according to Field. She’s done her own research, she says, and it’s clear that his recommendations have both “killed people” and made him money.
The violence of her sign, though — where is that coming from? At a primal level, it seems to convey pain or fear.
“Of co — ” Field starts, then stops. “Well …"
How would she put it?
“I feel so bad that so many people have lost their lives. That hurts, because we all have loved ones that have touched our hearts and passed away.”
Almost no one alive has experienced this kind of sudden mass death, this level of widespread illness, this freezing and fracturing of all life. It hurts. For much of the 1980s, every single one of Fauci’s AIDS patients died. Ugly deaths that he was powerless to prevent. He had to suppress the pain and bury the emotion to get through each day. When he recalls that era, his eyes water and his throat constricts. His self-diagnosis is a quick aside (“post-traumatic stress”) as he bridges the past and the present. In the middle of a cataclysm, it’s hard to see the end. But it does end.
“As a society, when we get out of this, you know, we’re going to look up and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, what we’ve been through,’” he says. “We’ve had an outbreak where we’ve lost close to 900,000 people in the last two years. That’s going to have a long-lasting effect.”
In the early ’70s, when he was chief resident in a Manhattan hospital, Fauci remembers glancing out over the East River in the middle of the night, “Saying, you know, I’m tired, but I can’t stop until at least this patient is stabilized.” When he was the main attending physician at NIH during the AIDS crisis, he wouldn’t leave the ward until he addressed every patient need. Now he views the entire country as his patient — a patient afflicted by both a virus and an undiagnosed condition that hampers its ability to fight it.
He could spare himself further pain and exhaustion and allow America to see another doctor. He could tag out.
“That’s not my character,” he says. “I don’t do that.”
The patient, you see, is not stabilized yet.
Fauci stares out the kitchen window into his small backyard. Right now he sees a crossroads for America. The best-case scenario: increased vaccination, more immunity, antiviral drugs, a virus under control. If we work together. The worst: a new variant, as transmissible as omicron but more deadly, exacerbated by that comorbidity — the deterioration of our minds and politics.
“It’s like it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and I’m looking out the window at the East River,” Fauci says, “and I got a patient who’s bleeding, and another patient has a myocardial infarction, and another patient who has septicemia —”
The sense memory prompts a sort of pep talk for the present.
“There’s no time to be exhausted, folks. You got a job to do.”
a calm, restful state of mind
To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little.
MARY KARR
Find what gave you emotion
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
If you walk in the mist, you get wet
If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to learn something, go to the source. Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master said, “If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree.” If you want to know poetry, read it, listen to it. Let those patterns and forms be imprinted in you. Don’t step away from poetry to analyze a poem with your logical mind. Enter poetry with your whole body. Dogen, a great Zen master, said, “If you walk in the mist, you get wet.” So just listen, read, and write. Little by little, you will come closer to what you need to say and express it through your voice.
NATALIE GOLDBERG
Collette
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
Thursday, January 27, 2022
Belinda
At 6AM officer Knudson stopped her for running the red light. She rolled down her window.
"License and registration please." he grumbled, shining the flashlight into her vehicle.
She reached across to the glove compartment and took out her registration. She rummaged around her leopard skin bag for her wallet, pulled out her license and handed it to him, her iridescent blue nail polish visible. When he glanced up at her he spotted dark red water dripping down her neck from under her cap. It looked like mercurochrome.
"Ma'm, you're leaking red liquid on your neck."
"Oh, that's my hair dye. I was just swimming at the YMCA pool. I'm actually still in my bathing suit."
"It's 8 degrees out and you're dripping wet?"
"When I come out of the YMCA pool. I can't use a towel because it will make my skin wrinkle."
"That's a high price to pay for beauty."
"My husband is fourteen years younger than me and so I try my best to look his age."
"I see." Knusdon wondered if she was telling the truth. It was dark and he was tired.
"I tell my husband it's it's one thing for me to get up at 4:30 to swim at 5:AM
but quite another to drive home soaking wet, in winter."
"The things we do for love," he said, handing back her license and registration. She noticed he was wearing black leather murderer's gloves. "Go home and warm up. Next time, stop at the red light."
"Thank you, officer . . ."
"Knudson," he said, blushing slightly in the cold.
Delicious
Tuna salad with chopped apples and dried cranberries, red wine vinegar, scallions, mayo, red bell pepper, salt+pepper.
A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing.
“But what bothers me, when I let it, is the way our new kitchen conforms so completely to the tenor of the times—our modern propensity, I mean, for cleaving to the sin and escaping the penalty. Go ahead, drive like a maniac, we’ll protect you with air bags. Go on, drink your sweet soda, we took out the sugar. Type sloppy, IBM will correct you; be rude, we’ll excuse you for your insecurities; be spendthrift, there’s always a credit card . . . all these things being wholly at odds with the moral climate I grew up in, where if you sinned, you suffered, and the retributions was approximately immediate. Drive crazy, you got hurt. Be a pig, you got sick. Type sloppy, you typed it over. Be rude, you got smacked. Be extravagant you went broke.”
― Peg Bracken, A Window over the Sink: A Memoir
“Kitchens were different then, too - not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing.”
-- Peg Bracken
“Many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available. And once they've chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.”
-- Peg Bracken
“On their return from a trip, it is wise to see friends promptly, before they've had time to get their pictures developed.”
-- Peg Bracken
“I didn't learn for years that you generally find your Self after you quit looking for it.”
-- Peg Bracken
“People would have more leisure time if it weren't for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.”
-- Peg Bracken
Words Conjure
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.
TONI CADE BAMBARA