New Year's Guides

 

The new year (which began really as the winter solstice passed in December) is traditionally a time for looking back and looking ahead but at a deeper level.  New Year's resolutions are the most familiar expression now, and though they tend to be superficial and repetitive (hence the boom in weight loss and exercise products this month), they at least suggest this impulse to reevaluate and resolve.  

Another way to look at it is to pause in the journey to reflect on it, and perhaps make more conscious use of our commitments and our guides.  I recently saw what to me was an unusual interpretation of the Buddhist (also Hindu) concept of dharma, as "a particular purpose and work in the world that is unique to us and of benefit to others."  For some of us, that purpose is defined and defining.  For most of us, it is complex, multiple, ambiguous, hard to define even to ourselves.  But we can define some of our guides on the journey, and hope the rest takes care of itself.

Three of my guides are represented here by concepts from other cultures, in other languages.  The fourth is an American way.  Though they are personal values, they govern my relationship with others: other people, other beings, others of any description I share this planet and this universe with, in my time.  

 Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word which literally means non-harming, the most basic Buddhist precept.  Poet Gary Snyder, who studied Buddhism for many years, defines the concept as “do the least possible harm.” "Least possible" refers to contexts as well as physical limitations.  So it is less restrictive than total non-violence, but it is broader in application.  It means do the least possible harm to everything—not just humans but animals, plants and even rocks.  It turns out to be an ecological as well as a moral principle. In life it means a change in assumptions—that is, think first before making a harmful change, not exactly second nature to western civilization.  Personally it means being mindful, respecting the other, and sincerely evaluating whether causing harm is necessary.  This is a key to the sacred attitude towards eating and other aspects of ordinary life that nevertheless have profound meaning.

 Hozho is a concept from Navajo culture, part of the Beauty Way.  A Navajo character in a Tony Hillerman novel explains it with an example: In times of drought the Hopi and some other cultures will pray for rain. But the Navajo do something else, based on a different approach to life.  “The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought…. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.” 

This does not eliminate trying to right wrongs, address problems, or change what needs to be changed.  But where it applies, this concept is not only a profound act of humility, but a necessary human response of adjustment to reality.  It’s something that other animals do instinctively—they find ways to cope with drought, for example. They adapt to the environment.  Instead of being angry or frightened, or obsessing on things as unjust and taking them personally, people accept the conditions and work within them to make life better—by conserving water, for instance.  Being in harmony is not easy.  The Navajo ceremonies take days.  But as a general principle, it only makes sense.

The third concept is Italian, and so part of my own Italian American culture.  Sprezzatura can be defined in various ways, but it can come down to making a personal style part of life, an elegance that is natural and appears effortless.  Tony Bennett applied it to music, but outwardly it can most often be seen in modes of dress.  There are places where such expression is noticed and valued, but more places where it isn’t.  But that doesn’t matter so much, because sprezzatura is an attitude, and expression (playfulness, authenticity) for its own sake.  Or to quote another Italian saying: Niente senza gioia.  Nothing without joy. 

The fourth concept I regard as the basis for all community.  It is expressed in the common phrase: "You'd do the same for me."  It expresses not only a commitment but a confidence that this commitment is shared.  It is a phrase of the people, by the people and for the people.  Which brings us (in a way) back full circle to ahimsa. 

Tangled Up

Bob Dylan has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

 When I saw this I immediately recalled a moment in my senior year of college--1967/8--when I railed to a lit professor that the literature of our times was being written by Dylan, the Beatles etc. in the form of a few minutes of song.

 It wasn't an original idea. I recall reading an interview with Donovan who referred to "Eleanor Rigby" as a three minute novel.

 But as important as Dylan's songs have been to me and to our times, this news didn't arrive as a vindication. I'm actually disappointed.

The truth is Bob Dylan doesn't need any more awards. I'm pretty sure he'd tell you that himself.  He's a pop star, and has been recognized for his contribution to American culture many times, including at the White House.

 But there are a lot of writers who aren't pop stars who have only a few shots at recognition. Yes, they can get medals from their nation for cultural contributions. But this is the big international prize for their art.

I think of Ursula LeGuin who is 87. She is only one of several I can think of who deserve this prize, which is given only to the living.

Giving Dylan this prize does nothing but muddy the waters. Does this make Sting and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen eligible? I guess so. But why? They don't need it. The world doesn't need it.

 Giving this prize to, say, Kim Stanley Robinson on the other hand could actually change the world. It would recognize a form of literature and give him a platform for expressing ideas and focusing a dialogue the world needs to survive.

 Hey, even a National Book Award or a Pulitzer would go a long way. But writers in the sci-fi ghetto don't get those awards, despite their contributions to literature and literary culture, not to mention the world. They have a better shot at the Nobel.

 So it's another occasion to celebrate Dylan's work (though eventually somebody is going to point out that his borrowings remain controversial) and that's fine. But we know about Dylan's work. We've been swimming in it for more than fifty years.  Is this more of an award for us?

Sure, I recognize that songs like "The Times They Are A Changin" and "Tangled Up in Blue" and a few dozen more have had more lasting and layered effects on me, including deep visceral effects, and may even say more about life in these times than almost any novel or poem.  But their power is in their nature as songs.

Without the music, Dylan might be--as Allen Ginsberg came to believe--a good minor poet.  That's not faint praise.  There aren't that many good minor poets. But that's not really relevant.  This is a different form.  Dylan would probably tell you that.  (And come to that, where is Allen Ginsberg's prize?)

 This prize is for literature, and the work of literature gets no greater recognition. Think of all that Margaret Atwood (for one) has written and done, and the example she sets for a literary culture. Or Gary Snyder (age 86.)  Or is that over now? That's not good.

It's possible to argue that songs of the kind that Dylan wrote aren't being written or at least heard as much anymore because popular music has changed. But that's a different argument. The fact is that the popular music forms are not threatened. They still bring in big bucks. Literary culture around the world is endangered. And this prize does nothing to support it.

Elders

People keep dying. Older than me, some younger, well known names. Known to me if not to you, for example, was John Henry Redwood. Known as an actor, some on screen, mostly on stage, he's been a developing playwright for the past decade or so, and a good one. Also a great person. A big man with a big heart and a big smile. I met him in Pittsburgh when the Pittsburgh Public Theatre put on one of his first plays. He was very interested in the craft of it. Actually we may have met when he was in an August Wilson play there. It's been awhile: I remember a patio party at someone's house where he and I sneaked off for a minute to check the Lakers playoff score---and Magic Johnson was playing then.

Anyway, he died recently. Not as heralded as John Ritter or Edward Teller or Warren Zevon or even Sheb Wooley (of Flying Purple People Eater fame), but a man whose presence and talent in this world will be missed. We will be lesser for his absence.

Which got me to thinking, not very originally, that we ought to honor people when they're still alive to hear it. I've picked some Elders I wish to honor. Some aren't in fact very much elder to me in years, but certainly in achievement.

Norman Mailer. He seemed to have retired during the Clinton years but Bush has brought Norman stormin back. Sure he's flawed in big ways, but he's a huge talent, and someone who has given me key thoughts and prompts over many years. I wasn't all that crazy about his book on the Pentagon march, though in 1968 that a writer with his credentials (and military novel) could write about anti-Vietnam and anti-draft youth with such conviction was important. His novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam?" was riveting. I loved his defense of Henry Miller when he was a notorious target of Womens Lib in the early 70s. For good or ill he's carried the torch for the heroism of writing and especially the aspirations of the novel during my lifetime.
Yet besides the example of his engagement and standards he tried to uphold, I'll remember specific things he said or wrote almost as asides. "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood." I heard him say that on a talk show (talk shows used to have actual writers on them) and it blew me away. Later I found it in one of his books, Advertisements For Myself I think. It's still a very profound personal and political formula for me.
And an offhand comment in his prose-as I recall he was narrating that someone had apologized for not having read one of his books and he said he understood entirely-that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other. That too is a guiding light to me. It says so much about books and life, and about how we continue to have new and illuminating experiences, how books speak to us in the course of our lives, they are there as resources for us, and how even the books are treasures at the end of the hard roads of life, a kind of payoff in wisdom and light and depth for all that we've seen and felt and been subjected to.
I wonder if his more recent work has spoken to young people at the time. I haven't read him in recent years. Maybe I'm just not ready yet.

Robert Bly. Another writer with flaws, perhaps more lovable ones, but not entirely. But I doubt there's been anyone more important to poetry in America in the past sixty years. He's been at the forefront from the sixties on, with his personality and enthusiasms and in recent decades his transparency, his honesty and courage. He still gets dogmatic once in awhile but that's the kind of flaw that integral and forgivable and lovable. His powers of promotion have brought many wonderful poets to wider attention. He's kept that up, from Neruda in the early 70s to Machado and Rumi and more. He's been close friends at different times with two of the best poets of the age, James Wright and William Stafford.
He's taken a lot of heat about the men's movement from people who have entirely distorted what's he said and what he's done. I respect him as an elder and I will always listen to what he has to say. He's written some fine poems, and he has done more than anyone to revive the performance of poetry, except perhaps Allen Ginsberg (who took up the squeezebox at about the time Bly took up his stringed instrument.) He's one of the connecting points between so many important places in our culture and consciousness.

Bill Moyers. Bly was but one of the voices of our age that Bill Moyers introduced to millions of people. The range and quality of his work over the years is nothing short of astounding. I have transcripts of his programs and books from his various programs and series' going back to the sixties. Political, imaginative, artistic, thoughtful life in these decades would be so much poorer without him. Even today, his PBS series "Now" is virtually alone on television as a quality news program of relentless probity, leavened by intelligent enthusiasms in art and thought. Bill Moyers is really the hero of the television age.

Leslie Marmon Silko. She's not much older than me, but she's an elder in many ways in what she knows and writes. She's the most profound and political of the many excellent Native American novelists, poets and nonfiction writers. Her generation that came of age in the 60s with an explosion of writing turns out not to have been an anomaly. American Indian writers remains vital, and beats new paths. But the continuing energy of this generation's writers, especially Silko and Linda Hogan, still inspires me.

Doris Lessing. A writer who would never let anyone else define her. "The Golden Notebook" made her a feminist heroine, but she refused to be limited or defined by any political agenda. Her science fiction novels are amazing in their conception, though she got little credit for them-puzzling both mainstream fiction adherents and s/f fans. I don't find her much of a stylist, but her energy and intelligence propel you forward. She must be a model for other strong women writers like Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin. Atwood has a takes no prisoners intelligence, yet she's witty and civilized, and she sure can write (some of her short stories in particular are outstanding.) LeGuin is heroic as well, although she's offended me with some of her sexist talk, but like Lessing she's her own person, and quite forthright-and often right.

Maxine Hong Kingston. Again, an elder in example and inspiration, but not elderly. Her new book is courageous, not for what she's endured or even done, but in her honesty with herself, and honest attempt to tell us the truth. But not only that: it is the textures of her telling that ultimately are the most inspiring. I'll bet she's a great teacher, and I'm glad that her books are so popular on campuses. She believes in literature, in story, imagination; her new book unites the world of literature with the attempt to unite inner and outer peace-for example, by using meditation in her workshops with war veterans.

I need to add two or three more---there are many more, of course, but I can't neglect these: James Hillman , the most important of the post-Jungians, who lately has turned his attention to the subject of elders and aging. I just listened to the audiobook version of his print book (which I read when it came out), The Force of Character. It is a great listen as well as the usual rivetting and admirable read. He quotes another elder who has valuable and inspiring things to say about aging, Theodore Roszak. I've written about both these men and their work in this and other blogs.

Then there is Paul Newman , who acted in important movies as a young man, in middle age and in his later years. Then he parlayed his fame into a business that simultaneously offers good, healthy and tasty products and helps support good causes and artists. He's been a model in so many ways for so long, that his few lapses---that oil company commercial, and the promo suggesting that "Washington Week in Review" is something more than the march of cliches by timid journalists mouthing conventional wisdom very occasionally enlivened by new information or analysis---are easily forgiven. Now he's helping to bring Thorton Wilder to TV. He's been admirable in many ways, in his personal trials as well as modest in his triumphs, and so it's fitting to end this tribute to all elders with him.

Finally there's someone who exemplifies the elder perhaps best of any I can think of, and that's Gary Snyder. A poet of mythic power, whose life and work have forged crucial links important to the future, in his pioneering synthesis of Buddhism, Native American worldview, practical ecology and much more. His prose works such as The Practice of the Wild, The Old Ways, "Four Changes" and the interviews and essays in The Real Work and A Place in Space are essential as any body of work created in my lifetime. He is the elder teacher of our time, who introduces, connects and interprets knowledge as a guide on our individual, collective and planetary journeys.

I hope all of these people are around for a long time. But in my life they've been inspirations and so I testify to this, while others can still take advantage of their live presence.

Wonderful

Things are still pretty unsettled in my little world. But I've got two moments that I'd have to classify as wonderful, and both happened on the same day.

The first was a small and so far solitary personal victory. For something like five or six years now, I've had this little musical play that I wrote---a play for (I figure) junior high age kids, about smoking. It's a musical, and I wrote songs for it. I really liked it, but I've had to pick my battles-those things I tried to steel myself to send out into the world of rejection, misunderstanding, envy and heartbreak. Some of those items perhaps deserved not to be published or produced or whatever, but when you start out and believe in what you've done or at least the potential of it, you have to go forward and see what happens. But I have to be selective, not really just in terms of what I think is the quality of what I've done, but in the kind, the quality and the quantity of shit I'm inviting. For example, I can expect a nonfiction book proposal to get at least a little respect from somebody, since I've published a nonfiction book, and I'm an Author and a Freelance Writer. But if I try springing a musical play for kids-look out! Blank stares, or just total blankness. Cause you see I'm not a career playwright, I don't have my PhD in Advanced Dramatury nor have I workshopped and networked nothing but plays plays plays for ninety years---let alone musical playwright OR kids writer. In this world you write childrens books about stamps, and that's your identity for life.

And not only is the rejection more likely, it's harder to take, because I'm also insecure, for the same reason---I've got no track record. Maybe it really is shit. But I never believed this play or the music was shit. However, I could never get a recording that represented the music to my satisfaction. Because I couldn't afford the time or the money to do it, and there wasn't anyone else interested and able to help make that happen.

Then technology sort of caught up. Several years ago I got an inexpensive four track recorder. I had an electronic keyboard-not a great one, but not a real cheapo either. I composed the songs on that keyboard, with all that instrumentation, using presets in my own way. Over the course of a couple of years, when I could stand to spend all that time and belief, I recorded the songs. Actually I recorded the three songs people who heard them liked best, and they did seem like the obvious "hits"to me, too. And I recorded short versions of the other songs, just to indicate how they would go in the script. This wasn't easy.

Then I had to listen to all the takes, choose the best ones, redo several vocals, sometimes whole songs. And then, I didn't have the equipment to mix these recordings to my satisfaction. By then the programs to mix on the home computer were coming along, and so were the computers. Finally I found a program cheap and easy enough to use just to make a decent CD. It took hours more, and two computers, but just when it looked like---or rather it sounded like---it was never going to happen, it did happen. I now have a CD that sounds pretty good. Not perfect but (as we used to say) good enough for this band. It's musically okay and gets the idea of the song across. So finally, after all this time, this much exists, and that's about as wonderful as it's been in such things.

The second wonderful thing also has to do with music and technology and specifically, this laptop. On it I watched and listened to the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night" I borrowed from the library. You know how many times I've seen this movie in theatres? I stopped counting at 20. Then came the video restoration (which I have) and now the DVD. And it's the best yet. Moments as terrific as some moments in the theatre. But as an overall viewing and listening experience, better.

You can now see all the flaws that the big screen hid, but you can also see all the little subtle things. And mostly it's the presence. The immediacy. A combination of the visual image and the music through the earphones. (A lot of Beatles stuff at a certain point was in true stereo, which makes earphones worse than useless for me, since I can hear only in one ear, and therefore only half of the song---the drums and the backup vocals, or switch to the lead vocals while the rhythm cuts out-very frustrating, torture really.) But this is mixed so I get stereo through both earphones. (Something I picked up from the recording program was what added echo/reverb sounds like, and so I could identify that reverb was added to the songs the Beatles play in the concert in the end, so the music sounds like it's being played live in a hall---though of course in that hall the music wasn't heard at all, just the screaming.)

It's a nice DVD package, with interviews with everybody they could find, including the woman who did makeup, but those Brits talk so well that even all these bits were interesting and fun. I can't figure out why they didn't include the "I'll Cry Instead" footage they added in the video version, but other than that, it's a fine two DVD set. But the movie-that the thing. That's the wonderful thing.

I remember long ago---1969 to be exact---I was walking with a college friend in Berkeley, and I happened to mention Wallace Stevens' statement that the purpose of art was to make people happy. My friend, a philosophy major on a heavy political and psychological trip, laughed at me. I doubt if that's why many artists do it, he said.

Kurt Vonnegut said something like that in his novel Timequake. "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'the Beatles did.'"

They didn't do it alone in this movie, and finding the right people at the right time and inspiring them was part of their genius, their success when it worked, and their bad times when it didn't. They rescued Richard Lester from making commercials for the rest of his life, and he turned out to be a very fine director, with several of the best films of the 60s and early 70s. They inspired the camera people, the editors, the other actors, etc. In some ways, this movie is like Shakespeare for the 60s-full of clichés, because the lines became part of the culture. I could recite the times even in recent years that people have quoted from this movie. Yet I had forgotten some of the funny bits.

I've got to take the DVD back to the library tomorrow, so as soon as I post them, I'm going to watch it again.