The return of Mister Helpful

This morning in the zendo, a noisy fly buzzed around for the first twenty minutes. Something to listen to; I admit I waved it away a few times, when it sounded like it was coming in for a strafing run. I was reminded of something I read where the speaker, a longtime San Francisco Zen Center person, was quoting Reb Anderson, that temple's second white abbot. Anderson reportedly said that the reason people are so annoyed by the ubiquitous insects at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center is that "they think the bugs are optional."

Well, in San Francisco, the bugs pretty much are optional. And I've never heard a housefly buzzing around at 6:00 a.m. But there it was.

Finally, as it grew light outside, the fly went away to the other side of the room where the windows are. Making for the light, it smacked into a window: zzzzzzz-vut! and was heard no more. So much for that distraction.

When the bell rang, I stood up and got to see who else was in the room. "Josh," the nudge, reappeared several days ago, and has cut me a wide berth since returning. (Perhaps he read my weblog where I called him a nudge; that's the only explanation I can think of, hard as it is to believe anyone reads this at all.) He has hardly even looked at me, which suits me fine.

The only people there besides the regulars were this couple who come on Thursdays sometimes. Several weeks ago they got a full, unasked-for orientation from one of the priests -- but he's kind of the senior guy there, so he's got the right. That was before Josh came along at all, so he didn't know these two had already gotten the full spiel. So after the service when we all filed out (or actually just off to the shoes area, on the side), he went up to them and just started in. Stand this way -- hold your hands that way -- hold the sutra book this way -- the bells mean bow this way, et cetera.

I rolled my eyes, but as he went on and on -- the hapless couple humbly enduring it -- I glanced at him while I was putting my shoes on. He was so happy telling these people how to behave. He was still going at it as I left.

The funny thing about this is that later in the morning I read about Natalie Goldberg coming to the Minnesota Zen Center for the first time, how nobody told her what to do, and how that seemed so part of it.

But Hartford Street seems pretty informal about everything, frankly. It's really not strict. I don't know if that's part of the tradition there, or if it reflects the fact that the place seems a bit rudderless without a resident abbot or practice leader. (Kokai, the latest applicant, has vanished, so I guess something didn't work out about her. She seemed okay to me, but what do I know about how the place really runs.)

 
Unchained feeling
 
I'm reading a book by Natalie Goldberg called Long Quiet Highway. It combines an autobiography (I love to read them) with my two favorite topics, writing and contemplative spirituality. Goldberg, who is famous for a couple of how-to-write books, tells the story of how she became a writer and a meditator.
 
I'm really enjoying this book. Goldberg is a wonderful writer, and I relate to much of what she says. Since she talks a lot about freeing oneself to write and to live, and since she is famous for her other books on that topic, I expected to feel uplifted and inspired by this book.
 
Instead, it just makes me feel sad, and I'm not sure why. Partly jealousy, that she had the courage to challenge middle class expectations in her 20s a lot more than I did, and that she had such faith in her own development as she grew. Partly a recognition that, for all the people her techniques have inspired, I have never reallly been helped by them (like everyone else, I've tried them). Partly a recognition that, for all its promise and the real changes that did happen, much of the revolution of the 60s has fizzled. (Planet still theatened by ecodisaster; women and minorities still not free; Americans still getting fatter and fatter; consumerism still rampant. Meanwhile there's even more child slavery, international sex trade, ethnic genocide than there was in 1965 Just about the only thing that's a plus is a lowered nuclear threat.)
 
Now that I'm almost 46, I consider myself part of the Establishment. It doesn't matter that I'm a pornographer or bisexual or that I go to a zendo in the mornings. I'm a homeowner, a corporate manager, a churchgoer; I consume madly (the thing I'm most regretful of). So I'm not on the outside anymore, slinging mud, yelling, protesting. Now I'm on the inside, and I have to take responsibility for the state of the world. I can't blame it on my parents' generation. My generation has had 30 years to get things right; didn't happen. The world's as fucked up as it was in 1974 when I graduated from high school.
 
So I feel sad when I read about someone growing and blossoming in the culture of the 60s and 70s. Not that I didn't do as much of it as I could at the time, and later (I'm 8 years younger than Goldberg). But I've peeked ahead in the story, and I know that for all the promise and hopes of that time, things didn't turn out the way we expected.
 
I'd like to write more on this next time -- about the letdown of now.
 

 
Get together

My wondrous friend Marilyn Jaye Lewis -- an early contributor to my zine Frighten the Horses, a prolific author and editor of erotica and creator of several websites having to do with erotica -- is starting, yes, a new website. And it has a whole organization to go with it.

Last year Marilyn and I, along with writer Susannah Indigo, were nominated for Erotic Writer of the Year in the U.K. by a group that holds a huge annual awards shindig/performance/party/orgy. Marilyn won, of course, and we had so much fun that she started wondering why there were no such awards in the U.S. Marilyn, who contributes regularly to anthologies and knows everybody, felt there should be a way to recognize all the good work that's out there. So she has started the
Erotic Authors Association to “honor literary merit and achievement in the writing and publishing of erotic Literature.” They're looking for members and for nominations for this year. So get on over there and join the party.

By the way, Marilyn's project for last year, The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica, is continually in the top five or six hundred over at Amazon. I surf over there to get a vicarious thrill. My books aren't doing nearly so well. My latest book, Too Beautiful and Other Stories (2d edition), is like number 770,000. It sure wouldn't hurt for somebody to write an Amazon review of it.

 
Who took the Bomp from the Bompalompalomp?

I'm still obsessively playing "Deceptacon DFA RMX" off the Insound site, while surfing the web for more about my new fave band, Le Tigre. I also found some mp3 files of parts of the original "Deceptacon," which led off the band's first, self-titled album. I was surprised to find that the original record is just a straight-ahead lo-fi garage rock song, which the "DFA RMX" version is set to a hip-hop beat that makes Le Tigre sound like the 21st century's answer to the Tom Tom Club.

One of the reasons I've been listening to the tune so much, aside from the fact that it's the most wonderful thing I've heard since that song "Gundaam" opened up the movie "Ghost World," is that the "DFA RMX" version is only available on vinyl.  Yes, because it's a dance version.   All right, I can dig it. But who the hell has a turntable nowadays? What am I supposed to do?

I guess I have to start stealing my music like the rest of the world and start with the mp3 downloading. Uch, I don't know a single 22-year-old. Who's going to teach me how?

 
Rama lama ding dong

I love the Insound website. Not only can I find all kinds of alternative music there I could never find anyplace else, but they have a constantly updated 25-song jukebox that clues me in to all sorts of fantastic shit I would never hear about otherwise. I've just been listening, for the tenth time straight, to Le Tigre doing ... what is it ... "Deceptacon DFA RMX" off their Remix 12 EP. It fucking rocks. It contains the phrase "rama lama ding dong." I think any song containing that phrase should be a number one hit. I haven't been so tickled by an old fifties r+b phrase since Clinton named to his cabinet somebody named Sha La La.

More on Le Tigre here.

Okay, so I'm actually showing how lame I am. Le Tigre was on Terry Gross's show "Fresh Air" more than a year and a half ago! (Go to Fresh Air's site and listen to the Sep. 5, 2000 show. I'm just discovering them. I don't care! They're great!

 
Thinking caps on!

Further to that bit about artistic savants and the possibility of normal people -- I guess you're not supposed to say that anymore are you? Oh, well -- being able to access similar narrowly-focused, high-powered brain skills: this article from the BBC. Supposedly someone has invented a device to stimulate brains such that users' brainpower is enhanced. Can't stop thinking of "Young Frankenstein".

I don't know why they need that. There's an espresso place just downstairs.

In other news, I couldn't stop laughing at this article in the SF Chronicle about a woman who married some rich goombah from Vegas and is now a "raw food chef." I had to stop reading around the time I got to the part about how she hauls her vegan ass to the farmers market in a Mercedes SUV, I was laughing so hard. Don't miss the pictures, especially the one where she's doing yoga in her enormous mansion with hubby -- on a MARBLE FLOOR! Now that's healthy!

 
Pesky memories

I spent a long time reading about zen before getting anywhere close to actually trying it. One of the things I read was a quote from someone who commented on the universal experience of meditators who, tyring to quiet their minds, are vexed by thoughts and memories that keep arising. This writer -- I've forgotten who, and where I read this -- said something like he wished he had stopped listening to the radio a long time ago because every lousy Top 40 song, commercial jingle and other scrap of audio from the last 30 years were now replaying in his mind during meditation.

I had read other accounts of unwanted memories and thoughts plaguing the meditator, but this was the only one which made it sound like your life was passing before your eyes, sort of like the first scene of the movie "Contact." In that film, the camera pulls back from earth and out into deep space, and as it gets farther and farther away from earth, the audience hears the whole history of broadcast television and radio, in reverse. Somewhere around Jupiter you hear Nixon resign. Farther out, "a day that will live in infamy." Even farther, "Watson, come here, I need you." And finally, the dots and dashes of Morse code -- presumably "What hath God wrought."

I was reminded of this when I read this article about autistic savants, with this intruging passage:

Compulsive practice might enhance these skills over time, but Snyder
contends that practice alone cannot explain the phenomenon. As evidence, he cites rare cases of sudden-onset savantism. Orlando Serrell, for example, was hit on the head by a baseball at the age of 10. A few months later, he began recalling an endless barrage of license-plate numbers, song lyrics, and weather reports.

More at http://www.discover.com/feb_02/featsavant.html -- a terrific article about savants and the potential for ordinary people to unlock the brain's functioning. I'm usually not interested in futuristic science articles, but this one is great.

Of course, my mind is a veritable riot of thoughts, memories and fantasies during meditation. It rarely calms down during the 40-minute session. I have to sit for a couple of hours before I really start calming down. That's why I wish I could go to tomorrow's monthly one day sit, which goes from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. But Cris and I have tickets to the ballgame, another opportunity to meditate.

 
Do it right

There's a new guy at the zendo -- I'll call him Josh. He's in his late 20s or early 30s, is lay-ordained (wears a rakusu), and has recently been getting the hang of the doan tasks (the doan rings the bells, carries incense, lights candles, etc.). Josh also takes it upon himself to helpfully tell me the right way to do things. Last week it was the right way to hold the sutra book. Yesterday he asked me if I had been to the beginner instruction held on Saturday mornings, and when I said no, he told me all about it.

Now, I've only been coming to the zendo for two months, and I still consider myself a beginner, but I don't need to be told how to sit or hold my hands. Don, the guy who is the regular doan, cocked an eyebrow and said, "Mark doesn't need beginner instruction. He's been coming for two months."

So this morning one of the priests, John, asked me for the second time if I would be interested in learning how to be doan. Josh, who was in the back straightening up, stuck his head out and piped up, "I'll train anybody to be a doan!"

"One of the guys at the zendo is a nudge," I told Jenny, my office mate this morning.

"So out of place in a zen context," she replied.

"He told me the right way to hold the sutra book."

"'Get the fuck out of my face, man, it's five a.m.!'"

"Really."

I have an ambivalent relationship to the zen "forms," as they refer to the standards for how and when to bow, walk, hold things, etc. On the one hand I respect and follow them as best I can. On the other hand, I don't find them interesting and I'm not particularly desperate to know the right way of doing things. So when Josh tells me the right way to do something, I just say "thank you." Not "Get the fuck out of my face," although that might be appropriate at some point.

I told John I might be interested in learning to be the doan at some point -- the bell-ringing looks like the most fun part -- but I felt I wasn't ready yet. And it's true. I just want to learn how to sit well. And now that Josh is around, Don doesn't need a backup.

Various positions

Sunday I went into the office to write, and I managed to write about 450 words to kick off chapter 15 of my novel. After that I was stuck. I spent the rest of the time looking at the outline and not being very focused. But it's progressing.... slowly....

Last week after zazen on Wednesday or Thursday, Jim Briggs was chatting with someone else saying there would be a new "beauty contest contestant" in Hartford Street's continuing search for a new practice leader. (This harked back to the confusion at the sesshin at the beginning of March when someone they had invited to lead the sesshin got pissed off by something at the very first and buggered off.) The new person is named Kokai Roberts (not the reporter Cokie Roberts, ha ha) and is from SFZC. She showed up today: a short slightly round woman with short, but not shaved, hair. At the end of zazen she left the zendo and went upstairs, as the doshi often does; but then she came back down after a few minutes and said hello.

After sitting seiza style on a cushion-and-a-half two or three times last week and finding it a little unstable, I decided to sit only on a cushion this morning. It was more stable, but also more painful for my feet toward the end. It was only bad for ten minutes at the end, though, not twenty, and I was able to go almost the whole forty-minute period before moving. And then I only moved a little.

I try not to get upset by all these attempts in various directions; I tell myself that the important thing is to be there and to try "sincerely," that eventually I'll find a good position if I just stick with it. I'm also mindful of an article I read by someone who had been sitting for twenty years; she wrote that she still finds herself changing her position as her body changes. So there's no final arrival, I guess.

I'm not even trying lotus or even half lotus. I would have done half lotus up to about 34 years old, maybe. After that I don't think I would have been flexible enough. It still doesn't make me want to start doing yoga, though, even though SFZC has someone who specifically teaches yoga to people to help them sit better.