Skating Through the Bedlam

 “What is going on here?!!” the question we all wake up to these days. If you think you have the answer, you don’t. If you refuse to ask the question, you contribute to the bedlam. The best we can do is to keep the question front and center and see where it leads us.

 

One thing to consider: the dizzying hyper-pace of rapid change—economical, cultural, political, ideological, ecological—creates an unstable environment that is stressful to the human psyche. Low stability creates high anxiety and high anxiety lowers us to the brain-stem of fight/ flight/ freeze reactions that blocks our capacity to think clearly, imagine creatively and feel wholly. The rise of fundamentalism in all its horrific guises— political, religious, ideological— is a fearful response that has us refusing to look at truth (flight), paralyzes our ability to think (freeze) and rouses us to blame and attack imagined enemies (fight). 

 

Back in 1979, in the midst of a year-long trip around the world, I received a letter from a friend telling me about long gas lines and increases in prices. I wrote this in my journal: 

 

What freaks me out about returning to the U.S. is the frenzied pace at which things change, the feeling of being caught on a runaway horse that  you can’t control. Though things are changing here in Indonesia and in India, the pace is slow enough that there is ample time to absorb and digest it. Culturally, there’s a strong sense of stability, as I noticed reading a description of life in the Ramayana that was pretty close to modern day rural India and as I felt so strongly in Varanasi witnessing a scene that could have been a thousand years old. 

 

In America, no sooner do you gulp down and swallow one change than another is forced down your throat before the first is digested. Especially economically, things are changing so fast that it feels like the whole country is walking on ice, slipping and sliding around with barely a moment to stand firmly balanced. That feeling of the surroundings being so far out of our control that all we can do is look on helplessly while ice cream triples in price, gas soars out of sight, movies reach New York’s old play prices, apartments keep rising. I wonder if the Muni buses are still 25 cents. This perpetual state of crisis feels psychologically crippling. Like something dropped from the sky that picks up speed as it hurtles down to the earth, “progress” and change in America is accelerated so much that there are generation gaps within a five-year age span. As Arnold Toynbee wrote: “Modern civilization is nothing but Adam’s original sin equipped with an infinite quantity of energy and explosive power.”

 

Because that power is so fierce, the balancing power of the alternative culture must be equally fierce to combat it. Which is why so many people feel like the spiritual center of the world has shifted to America, where so many are investigating spirituality and engaged in political resistance. Like the climax of the wayang kulit shadow puppet play, the forces of good and evil gathering to prepare for the final battle. The battle is as old as human history but ,as Toynbee notes, a thousand times amplified. Whole countries with nuclear weapons instead of swords, Mother Earth herself at stake, the princess that has been abducted. May America’s runaway horse of greed and domination grow weary, catch its breath, pause to consider where the hell it’s running to and why—and then stop and smell the flowers. “

 

In 1979 when I wrote this, ice cream was $.30, movies $4, gas $.86 per gallon, rents as cheap as $125 per month split three ways with roommates and as noted, the San Francisco Muni bus $.25. In 2022, ice cream is $4.00 a scoop, movies $15, gas $6.86 per gallon, rents for a single studio $2200 per month and Muni $3. The pace of change keeps accelerating so an i-Phone two years old is already obsolete. Our skills at skating on the slippery ice of rapid change are diminished and many simply choose to cling to a pole of fundamentalist thinking or conspiracy theory with their assault rifle at their side. 

 

I believe that the planned obsolescence that contributes to rapid change, our historical obsession with “progress” and addiction to the new and different, our fixation with more and more and more is something we could reconsider. High stability means low anxiety and that is a healthier state of affairs. Building things to last that are capable of repair, keeping joyful traditions alive, while also fresh and new (the territory I helped create and defend at my school), shifting our hunger for the new from things to art, learning to live with less and appreciate that which is perpetually renewable— gardens, music, child-raising, etc — would all steer us away from the anxiety that not only spawns fundamentalism and delusion, but also feeds depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, all those things that cripple our capacity to love, savor and protect life. 

 

But slowing the rate of change will take time. Meanwhile, let’s improve our skating skills, peel ourselves away from those rigid poles of fear that paralyze us and learn how to negotiate the slippery ice of our modern times. 

 

 

Kissing the Joy

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy.

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

 

-      William Blake

 

“Kissing the joy as it flies” is a perfect description of an improvised group-sing with Bobby McFerrin and friends, an eternal sunrise that happens every Monday at noon at the Freight and Salvage Club in Berkeley. I knew what to expect, but still was both astounded and uplifted by the constant flow of melodies and harmonies unspooling moment by moment, each note suggesting the next and arising naturally out of the previous. I’m no stranger to this phenomena, as this kind of spontaneous music-making is the bread-and-butter of the Orff approach I’ve taught my whole life. But the high level of virtuosity and artful shaping by Mr. McFerrin and friends catapults it all into a stratosphere beyond the reach of mere mortals. And yet not, as they invite the audience to participate and sing beyond themselves. 

 

Blake knew something about our wish to capture and repeat any moment of joy, happiness or transcendence. Indeed, that desire runs much of our lives. We hear a great song and we want to own the record/CD, eat at a great restaurant and want to return and order the same dish, find a fabulous vacation rental and vow to return. We soon discover that reality is not exactly repeatable as we try to step into the same river twice, that the magic of the first time is rarely captured that way again. The Buddhists have been telling us this for a few millennium, suggesting that our grasping hand trying to hold what is slippery and elusive, our attempts to bind ourselves to our joys and pleasures, destroys the winged life we are meant to live. 

 

But the 90-minutes of singing yesterday was indeed a wild and joyful ride down a river filled with twists, turns and surprises, so immersed in the moment that there was no need to hope it was being recorded and expect to come back next week and sing the same notes. 

Just the invitation to kiss the joy as it flies with that most ancient of faculties, the human voice, led by those who disciplined themselves to sing anything they hear and open themselves to hear all the music waiting to be sung that has never quite been sung like this before. 

 

If you live in the Bay Area, get thee to the Freight and Salvage! If not, sorry. You won’t get it on Spotify.

Kenopsia

 This the word that John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coined to describe the “eeriness of places left behind.” He writes:

You can sense it when you move out of a house— noticing just how empty a place can feel. Walking through a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, or fairgrounds out of season. They’re usually bustling with life but now lie abandoned and quiet.

Having mentioned a long, illustrious history of school camping trips in my last post, this reminded me of the end of one of them at Calaveras Big Trees, a place we went to from some 20 years. Sometime in the late 1990’s, after five days of camping with some sixty  3^rd-5^thgraders and another fifteen adults, I wrote this poem:

CALAVERAS CAMPING TRIP—FRIDAY MORNING

The bus pulls out

A few minutes later, the cars follow

And I stay back for     

            one last moment.

Pick up the abandoned sock, the dropped sandwich

and stand watching.

 

Two jays come to the campfire, 

three ravens

poke around the kitchen area

Squawking to each other

"They're gone."

 

A forest silence descends

            the trees exhale

"It's ours again."

 

 

Is this how it will be when the last humans are gone?

No traces but the smoke of a dying

            morning campfire.

 

How It Goes On

Last post, I mentioned singing around the campfire with 5^th  graders. My daughter Talia is their teacher and she was running this camping trip, the last one of its kind at a school that has been doing this almost 50 years. Sadly, she had to struggle to preserve it, advocate strongly in the face of the “Risk Committee mentality opposition,” but it happened and it was glorious. She went on her first school camping trip when she was two (my wife and I helped lead this trip, so we brought her along) and then officially with her class when she was eight and then continued with the Middle School versions until she was thirteen. And then has led this trip for the past six years. She knows the details of it all inside out and as a lifetime backpacker and hiker, embodies the spirit of life outdoors where body time takes over from clock time.

 

And so when I arrived, there was the dip bag line, the schedule with the daily hike, the quiet time, the cooking stations, the campfire, the some more’s, the songs and Old Doc Jones stories and folk tale/ myth story as the stars came out, the wandering minstrels (Dubbed Wandering Nostrils by the kids many years back) singing lullabies to the kids settling into their tents. Her two co-leaders were two teachers at the school who also were alumni, once kids I taught and camped with. Such a pleasure to see them all step up and carry it on, while still leaving a place for this old guy to participate side-by-side with them. 

 

In a recent interview, poet David Whyte talked about “what you’re going to pass on and leave behind you, the shape of your own absence.” Singing lullabies to the kids in harmony with my daughter, I could feel some of the shape of my forthcoming absence in that delicious moment of presence.  And this reminded me of the Gary Snyder poem Ax Handles, excerpted here below. Working with his son Kai, he makes a handle for a broken ax using an ax:

… I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

“When making an ax handle

     The pattern is not far off.”

And I say this to Kai:

“Look: We’ll shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the ax we cut with—”

And he sees. And I hear it again:

It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D. “Essay on Literature”— in the

Preface: “In making the handle

Of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand.”

My teacher Shih-hsian Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

Salt

 

I told a story to 5th graders around a campfire last night— the Russian folk tale Salt. The youngest foolish brother (always the hero in these stories) finds a mountain of salt on a deserted island, bags it up and offers it up to a King and Queen who laugh at him trying to sell him some white dust. The boy goes into the kitchen and realizes the cooks know nothing of salt and are cooking without it. When they’re not looking, he sneaks some into all the dishes and when the food is served, the King and Queen are astounded by the taste. When the boy confesses what he did, they happily exchange bags of precious jewels, gold and silver for that “white dust” that makes everything taste more delicious.

 

Today I’m going to help the 6^th grade at my newly-adopted school prepare for their concert next week. Their teacher told me the kids really missed me (haven’t seen them for 6 weeks), but it turns out it was less my charming personality and more the way I helped them sound better when I accompanied them on piano. My way of salting the waters of the music to bring out the full flavor of it all. 

 

So there you have it. There are many ways to help beautify the world, but sometimes it’s as simple as adding your few grains of salt to the mix so that everything tastes even better and becomes more fully itself. 

 

Sabbath

I hopped on my bicycle to help out for concert preparations at the school where I’m mentoring and five minutes into the 15 minute ride, realized I forgot my phone. Should I go back to get it and come to class a bit later? Do I need it in the next three hours? A moment’s pause and it was clear, “No, I don’t.”

 

After two classes, my colleague and I went down the street to have lunch and he suddenly realized, “Darn! I left my phone at the school.!” I confessed that I had left mine at home and he commented, “We’re naked!” And truth be told, and sadly, it felt a bit like that. Like the phone was some essential clothing item that covered our vulnerability. 

 

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea for the whole culture to agree that at least one day a week, no one use their phone or have it with them?” I suggested. Without missing a beat, he rejoined;

 

“Yeah, the Jews thought of that a few thousand years ago. It’s called the Sabbath.”

 

 Ka-ching! 

The True Mirror

After over two years of filming a documentary about my last year at The San Francisco School, my angelic benefactor showed me the first cut of the film. Truth be told, I was anxious about seeing my 70-year old body and face for some 90 minutes and after the viewing, felt some of that anxiety was justified! No matter how much aging strongly suggests we relax our vanity, I believe my peers would testify that we’re constantly surprised anew each day as we wonder, “How did that face get in my mirror?” and not happily so. Though it’s true that the last stage of life is meant for the soul’s beauty, we still long for a pleasant countenance in both body and soul. Oh well.

 

But the thing that thrilled me about the film was watching all the happy children, not only in my class, but just playing out on the yard. We can forget about how much children suffer in all sorts of ways, but if properly fed, sheltered, cared for and loved, their default state is a much happier one than the average adult. They run with great enthusiasm from one place to another, laugh and smile more than adults (some studies have suggested 300 times a day to the adults’ 20) and I never tire of their expressive faces and bodies that far outdo our adult ones. My lack of burn-out in my 45 years of teaching came in no small part from the delight I took in being infected by their delight. Especially in my classes where they got to sing and dance and play music. 

 

So when I got tired of seeing my own face and imperfect body on the screen, I switched my focus to where it always is in my actual teaching, to the children themselves. And found myself hoping the viewer would let go of their “Well, he’s no George Clooney” disappointment and look at the true focus of my work. It reminded me of a poem I wrote almost twenty years ago, a poem I should tape on my mirror. It would help.

 

The True Mirror

The glass is a lie.

 

All it captures is time’s cruel ravages

    Gravity’s insistent tugs

          The footprints of the hours walking over our bodies.

 

If you want to see who you truly are in this world,

 

Look

     at the face of the child you are teaching.

 

Listen

     to the sound of the strings you are plucking.

 

Taste

    the soup you have so lovingly prepared.

 

Gaze

    into the eyes of your lover at the moment of union.

 

That’s the real story.

 

Pay no mind to the lies of cameras and mirrors.

 

Your true face shines out

       in the way you affect the world.