Susan Sontag died this morning. It is difficult to write about one death, let alone about the fifty thousand plus lives who were lost in a few tragic hours in Southeast Asia. So I won't. Not today.
[28 December 2004] link?
"If we live in mindfulness, the moment will come when we are not controlled by our desperation, when we are no longer driven by the seductions of our suffering because all experience becomes an act of meditation. Life becomes clearer, more fluid, more simple-though not necessarily easier. As the Buddha taught, life is suffering. This does not go away when we practice mindfulness-but what we think, feel, and do in the face of this suffering will change." -Claude Anshin Thomas
[24 December 2004] link?
I am not the only one excited about the new Almodóvar. It is scheduled to open at the Shattuck Cinemas on Wednesday, December 22nd...finally! I am trying to make the first showing with my friend K.
Nor, it seems, am I the only one who has been sanctioned by a library for reading- or wanting to read - inappropriate material. In my case, I was in the fourth or fifth grade, and wanted to read The Man In The Iron Mask. Too old for you, I was told. That was a souring moment in my relationship with librarians.
[20 December 2004] link?
I've written elsewhere about my experience with the Vietnam War era draft lottery in 1970. I was against the war. I had a few friends from that wayback time that had gone underground. Yet in the insight that comes from looking backwards, I am not sure how I would have responded if my number had come up. Reading At Hell's Gate and a recent New York Times article on the problems of returning Iraqi War vets has brought back my some of my own memories of encounters with Vietnam war vets in the late 1970's and early 1980's, while I was working in a homeless shelter in Berkeley.
Most of those I met were having more than just economic difficulties. A large number of them were having emotional problems and using alcohol or other drugs to help them cope.
I remember P, who sometimes woke up screaming in his bunk, much to the consternation of the other men in the dormitory. He was a big guy, and no one was about to give him grief about his nightmare driven disturbances. He played a mean blues guitar and engaged in regular nocturnal patrols of the shelter. One particular early morning I heard the door knob of the staff room turn. I opened the door to find P standing in the hallway. He had no shirt on and even in the half-light I could clearly see the jagged surgical scar that angled across his torso, from shoulder to pelvis. It was the kind of scar that gives you instant insight as to why someone might wake up screaming.
I also remember K who said he'd been a tunnel rat and was now strung out on heroin. He had a hard-nosed, but concerned, probation officer who gave him regular grief and a bad foot fungus he said he had brought back from the jungle. Despite daily dosings of the men's shower by bleach and other chemicals, I think it is K's foot fungus that has been following me for the past 20 years.
And I remember A, sweet, sweet A, who'd been a medic and had seen too many comrades die, seen too many body bags. He tried to drown out all the bad memories by drinking way too much alcohol. He would come in under the influence, wanting to talk, the talking always accompanied by many tears. There was nothing stoic in his pain.
I think of them and a few others. I was ill-equipped to help them in any way other than to try to show them the respect that they deserved as fellow members of the human race. But, I could not then, and can not now, fully comprehend their pain, the ghosts and the memories that haunted them. I can only...hope...pray...that wherever they are, that they have found a kind of peace.
In that light, I especially appreciated this quote from At Hell's Gate:
"At the retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh said to us, "You veterans are the light at the tip of the candle. You burn hot and bright. You understand deeply the nature of suffering." He told us that the only way to heal, to transform suffering, is to stand face-to-face with suffering, to realize the intimate details of suffering and how our life in the present is affected by it. He encouraged us to talk about our experiences and told us that we deserved to be listened to, deserved to be understood. He said we represented a powerful force for healing in the world.
He also told us that the nonveterans were more responsible for the war than the veterans. That because of the interconnectedness of all things, there is no escape from responsibility. That those who think they aren't responsible are the most responsible. The very lifestyle of the nonveterans supports the institutions of war. The nonveterans, he said, needed to sit down with the veterans and listen, really listen to our experience. They needed to embrace whatever feelings arose in them when engaging with us - not to hide from their experience in our presence, not to try to control it, but just to be present with us."
There is one more memory, remembrance. Ben, who had survived his time as a Marine in Vietnam, who had been homeless, but had gotten his life more or less together, had even been a co-worker for a while. Ben, who had made it through the war, shot dead by a robber on the streets of Oakland, now over ten years gone.
[19 December 2004] link?
I have taken a little detour from reading The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant and am now finishing up the moving, At Hell's Gate, A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace by Claude Anshin Thomas:
"In 1990 it became impossible for me to hide from the reality of my Vietnam experience any longer. Vietnam was not just in my head; it was all through me. I had talked intellectually about Vietnam, but I had never fully opened myself to the totality of this experience. Now the pain reached a point where it was so great that I wanted only to hide from it, to run from it yet again. My first thought, of course, was to get drunk. When I drink it covers the pain like a blanket. But under the blanket, inside me, is full of barbed wire; every time I move, it cuts at me, tears my skin. When I drink, I have the illusion that I have put a buffer between my skin and the barbed wire, but this is not the truth; when I am anesthetized, I am just not so aware of the ripping and tearing."
[18 December 2004] link?
My sleep patterns continue to be disturbed, no doubt because work is leaking into my dreams. It ain't the personal life, baby, as I've hardly had one in recent days, except for an after work (after work... what's that?) beer on Wednesday with two of my favourite guys.
This morning I woke at four, much better than the one or two a.m. of the previous four days. I felt somewhat refreshed, because after all, as Miss O'Hara says, "...tomorrow is another day", and today is not yesterday...at least that's the hope.
I also dreamed. It has been said that dreams are the mental state where we process the unresolved tangles of our life. Hmmmm...I don't know about that, but I know that I dreamt about a visit back to Atlanta and a meet up with Susan Johnson. I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room, she was standing in the doorway. She encouraged me to stay more than one day and we had a conversation about her purchasing the lamp shade from a lamp my mother used to have. Afterwards, I remember walking around Atlanta, winding up in some basement comic book store, populated by leather-jacketed clerks. Waking up, I had the thought that the Susan in my dream wasn't just Susan, that she was also Barbara, as if in my dream state they had somehow merged into one person, with distinctly separate selves.
[10 December 2004] link?
I woke up this morning before 2. Read my New York Times by 3. Did the cold, windy, walk down to the BART by 5. It's 7:30 now, and I've already been at work 2 hours. I'm not complaining. The morning sky was filled with stars. The sky was very clear, the air crisp.
Yesterday I spent the last 4 hours of my workday in meetings. I had a good talk with a friend, the director of an agency that provides meals to home-bound seniors. They have a wait list. The costs of the service aren't fully covered by their funding, so that they have to ration out the services. She controls the wait list, because otherwise her agency would suffer financially, perhaps even go under. I thought of her this morning. About her passionate expression of the wrongness that access to services, meals, for home-bound seniors have to be rationed at all. Yet, at the same time, she has to be responsible and make the tough decisions about access. She made me appreciate her in a new light, as a leader. She has to be the one to take the karmic bullets. She was complaining only about the harm the necessity of her choices caused to others.
[2 December 2004] link?
I actually do a lot of sitting. Sitting in front of the computer at work, working on one spreadsheet after another, or typing out emails. Sitting round conference tables, in meetings. One meeting after another. Sitting in the bed at home, reading the newspaper or trying to do some work. I also think about sitting, sitting in the zendo in the Castro, or sitting on the soft couch in my therapist's office.
I frequently check out the updates at monkBlog, which are usually infrequent, because there they are sitting, not thinking about sitting.
[1 December 2004] link?