It is cloudy out the window again, but with a distinct difference - the pale green grass of Christmas, so unusual, is now covered in dense snow, locked onto the arms of the pines and relieving the grass of perpetual restlessness.  It could be beautiful, but this beauty is hard to see.  A nasty cold of some sort that began to rise on Christmas Eve has reached its height - I hope - and colors everything with its malaise.  Terrible, no; but nothing seems breathtaking; all such glory is muffled, as sound is by snow.

And so, coincidentally, my predicament mirrors the final sentiments of Needleman's What is God? and the start of a new book, John O'Donohue's Beauty.  In most ways, the two books could not be more different, the former a heady philosophy of religion, the latter a poetics of wonder.  But the former, in the end, has come to meet the latter.  Says Needleman, "...it is the essence of man to incarnate the highest energy of the universe." That we do not, he says (following his enigmatic sorcerer/guru Gurdjieff), is our everlasting shame; and if we do not, we will not continue on, but fall apart with our bodies into nothing.  To find this energy, he continues, requires rapt attention to...to what is so beyond us that we need help.  We need a guru,a  master, to shape our will.

These are odd words coming from a philosopher who is also an atheist, who is also a mystic - a lover of a god beyond any concept of God. And it is also odd that, as a professor of religion, he does not tie the concept of spiritual help with the gurus of the East, and the Christ of the West, but rather to Gurdjieff - perhaps because the former have become so identified by pre-conceptions.  Regardless, we must reach this "higher energy," for everything, including the world, depends on it, in a very real way.  For if we do not, we shall bring down the world, both spiritually and in the very real way of fire and death.  This is something we all know.  And to do this, we need help to stand in the ash of our uselessness; we need help to purge what has blocked us from our heritage, so that we might become Man, what was intended before the beginning of time.

Then on to our Irish poet.  Says O'Donohue: beauty is at the center of Truth, for it confirms what otherwise we cannot touch.  It is there, out there, as well as in ourselves.  It cannot be elicited, but comes as grace, often unexpectedly.  It knits wholeness out of our scattered lives, and gives us, without argument, the reason to live.  Not all is beauty within us; there is much that is dark and conflicting and simply bad.  But beauty gives us the talisman, the star towards which to aim.  It is clean and whole, and so we can redefine ourselves in its image.  If we wish to live in wonder and beauty, we must clean that which is within us that defiles.  This is not only for the obvious reason that our lives will be better for it, but also because it might open us up to what might be our destiny, our reason for being; which, above all else in this world, might just be to make the beauty of creation more intense, more perfect, and more beautiful simply because we notice and appreciate it.  

Two entirely different approaches towards what is nearly the same thing: a purer way of attention, and a more perfect way of 'seeing.'  Both require a cleansing of mind and spirit, and both require help - one from some sort of teacher, another from a mysterious force that is real to all of us who have, at one time and another, been carried beyond ourselves by witnessing and appreciating of beauty.  That mysterious force is grace, and that teacher the hand of grace.  Grace is a force that proves itself, its reality, in beauty.  It also proves itself a force that cares, for its willingness to show us the way, unbidden, without favor towards anyone.  

What is not beautiful should be swept away.  But when we are sick, in one way or another, it is a hard thing to do.  The trick is in finding the help, the physician we need.  We have seen it in the religions, in the need to open up, to drop our will for another, a greater; to be ready to receive without kidding ourselves with the objects and thoughts of our petty wants.  It is, we know, a hard journey.  But in the realization of beauty, for a brief moment it becomes the easiest thing in the world.  FK                 

A long weekend, cloudy and wet, has descended into sleet and snow and freezing rain.  Add a nasty little cold virus to that, and you have the perfect ingredients for kicking back in the lounger and reading.  

And so I did, putting aside until last night the philosophically heavy book, What is God, by Jacob Needleman, for a lighter read, Caravan of No Despair, by Mirabai Starr.  The latter starts off with a real kicker: Mirabai is waiting with concerned relatives and friends for reports on her bi-polar 15-year-old adopted daughter, who the night before had taken off in the car and disappeared into the night.  Just then, the editor's edition of her first publication, a translation of St John of the Cross's work concerning enlightenment and the "Dark Night of the Soul," arrives by special delivery.  She is congratulated by all.  Half an hour later, the police arrive, telling her that her daughter is dead from a car crash.  She falls to the ground in grief.  If one knows anything about the Dark Night, when God itself leaves the seeker to nothing, one cannot avoid the spooky coincidence.  We know where the author is going.  We are hooked for the ride.

What follows next is a fascinating and disturbing story of her childhood - of her Long Island Jewish parents suddenly leaving all behind in the late 60's for the hippy life; of growing up in the Taos commune, where a mom leaves out a pitcher of ice tea unknown to all but the mom to be laced with LSD, which gives Mirabai an uncomfortable insanity that re-occurs throughout her life; where she is left to hitch around the South West as an adolescent girl, going from commune to commune learning about Zen and Hindu gurus and chi, and every other New Age philosophy under the sun. Where she is taken in by a charlatan and seduced, who some years later she marries and remains with for 8 unfulfilled years.  Of new attachments, of finally finding the right man, of a growing career as a writer of esoteric literature, and as a lecturer.  Of knowing just about every spiritual leader of our age, with a personal attachment to the famous Baba Ram Das (Dr Richard Alpert).  Where one, such as myself, finds oneself glad that one was never fully entranced and embraced by the hippie life that seemed, at one point, to be so marvelous. 

But then it comes back to the death, and to St John of the Cross. It is common to talk of this now, as if everyone has been through it, as if it were a part of the normal cycle of crises in our lives, but Mirabai makes it clear that this is not so.  As his translator, she knew the words, and as far as most of us can go, also the meaning behind St John's words, but she did not understand them until the death of her daughter  It is not until then that she grasps the complete loss of faith, of hope, of every knowable attachment to God or the Beyond or any other religious or fashionable way we might present this mysterious other. Then, there is nothing; then there is only the facade of knowledge, cheap icing on a cheap cake that does nothing for our real hunger and need.  And then, of course, she goes into recovery, where she recognizes something else.

Her writing style and self-presentation are almost too New - Agey, but it is worth the read - she does hit the point of the Dark Night.  It is not a fun place to be.  There is no hope, no bargaining, no return from it.  One is left in ashes.  Of course, it is the meaning of every tradition from the sphinx to the Crucifixion, in one way or another, but all those, in the end, are only words or pictures or visions.  One has to be there, and when one is, one doesn't want to be there.  It is not, in this dark place, anything like the final phase of the noble crusade of life.  Some of us have been there already - not I, thank God, but I have known others who have, who have lost children and who have been absolutely shattered.  I cannot understand, in being close to them, how they can survive, but they do.  For Mirabai, she pieces together the tattered bits of her New Age philosophy and trudges on, now, however, ever mindful of the emptiness that knows no consolation.  In it is, yes, mystery, but also a necessary loss of at least part of the soul.  It speaks of emptiness - it tells us that heaven or Nirvana or Paradise might not be fountains and willing virgins, but something so utterly alien that we cannot live with it; cannot live with it, just as Moses could not live if he were to look directly at the light of God.  

And so, coincidentally, I finished that book and continued to nearly the end last night of What is God?  And here, we find, that Needleman is talking of the same thing; that God is not anything at all what we can imagine, so much so that we might as well be atheists, for their is nothing to say about IT, nothing to believe about IT that is truly representative.  Except, I am coming to read, letting go of the "me" for the "I am."  "I am" fully embraced, with mind, body and heart, Needleman tells us, leads us to humility, which is an opening to everyone and everything else.  It is a forgetting of the "me" in a total embrace of being.  I will read the final words tonight, but it is clear that he, too, is pointing towards a Dark Night, where all must be lost to be gained, as every great religion has always told us.  But, when we see what this is through death, we know that this Night really does take everything - all we understood of comfort, of love, of God, of what is or might be.  No wonder we bury our heads in our illusions to hide from this. But to seek is not all foolishness, for we cannot remain with our heads in the sand forever.  We are, one way or another, going to know.

One last question: did those of the past, whose belief in their religion was absolute and unchallenged, have this Dark Night on their death beds?  Or did they go with their beliefs and visions right past the veil of mortality?  It is of utmost  importance to know, for the reason for human existence might lie in the answer. Perhaps something of an answer might come to us in the future.  FK     

Today, a reprint of the Essay, "The Night My Father Shot Santa," under Essays in the website.

This morning, I turned off the morning news and put on a very, very mellow Christmas CD as I cooked breakfast.  It was something of a surprise, as my waking, squawking self was suddenly confronted with peace, not the usual morning mood. And at that, I began to think of what I had read the night before, and of the implications of Christmas.

Imagine a neighborhood on the wrong side of town, where all of human squalor is concentrated in a few blocks as a microcosm of addled human kind, where even the good people are tempted, and often give in, to dishonesty; where even the best of people walk in fear and distrust and near constant anxiety amid the rubbish of the streets.  Then imagine that the incomprehensible force of the cosmos is suddenly born into this neighborhood, the child destined to recall all that he came from, to become the man who would remain aware that the nebulae are cotton-candy playthings of wonder, that time and eternity are only marvelous tricks of perception that reveal, as only he could know, the nature of the Ultimate.  And there he is, growing older, a mission forming in his mind, as he gazes to the sky from his squalor and ponders this humanity that is asleep, unaware of its divine nature, of its possibilities and intended destiny.  How does such a man deal with such dead-minded souls?  How does he awaken them? How does he get them out of the waste that they have made for themselves?  

And so we have Christmas and all that follows from that birth. Whether one has faith or not, it is an idea born from inner knowledge and despair, and ultimately, from hope.  We know, in flashes of perception, what life could be, and then we are left again with our daily grind.  Something needs to break this spell; someone needs to lead his sheep, for sheep we are.  In recognizing even the possibility of this savior, we are recognizing what we have become and that we must do something, must change something fundamental, to become more, to become what the infinite night of stars promises as it tickles our consciousness.   

Believe or not, it is our wish that this be so; even now, we have not been so abandoned as to not know that things are not as they should be.  And so we proclaim Merry Christmas as the words of hope, knowing that our time has come, or will come, but surely must come.  Merry Christmas.  FK 

 

Finished with the last book and desperate for something as enlightening, if not disturbing, I settled on Jacob Needleman's What is God?  It is turning out to be a good choice.  Right from the beginning we learn something new - or really, something old that many of us have forgotten.  Needleman was born in 1935 and grew up in Philadelphia near the big park that I know well, as my brother lived there for 20 years.  My brother's wife was Jewish (they have since divorced) and his neighborhood a tightly-nit Jewish community that often rubbed me the wrong way.  I felt so excluded; not insulted, really, but out of the flow.  Had my brother been able to see it, or so it seemed to me, he, too, would have found that he was only being tolerated.  It was surprising to me, as I had not had that feeling of exclusion since I was a kid and we had just moved into an old Yankee farm enclave in New England (it would become the most wonderful place in the world to me, but that is another story).
 
There are reasons for this, as for everything.  Needleman, a Jew himself, tells us of being chased by tough Catholics after school who wanted to "beat up the kike."  It brought up my own memories of life as a kid before the late 60's, the era when all this changed.  In my town, the most despised had formerly been the Irish Catholics, but by my time they had been reluctantly accepted, not as part of the elite, but, heck, passable.  Instead, it was the Polish and Italian kids who got hit with the mean jokes about stupidity and greasy hair, respectively.  Nothing really bad, but some bad memories, I suspect, and some resentment must still reside with some of these grown-up kids.  

Jews, traditionally, got it much worse from everyone, and such experiences die hard and linger long, but it is surprising to note how things have changed.  No one talks of "pollacks" and "wops" or "mics" anymore (at least not in a derisive way), and it's been decades since I've heard - in this case, read - the word "kike."  All mean stuff, and if one thinks society has gone to hell in a hand basket, we have to remember how it was in this country for those not of the primary Old English elite.  (In all fairness, they, too, were mocked as emotionally frigid "Wasps."  We were all part of the social pyramid).

But many other things have gotten worse.  Because of his background, and his times as a college student in post WWII America, Needleman happily forgot the harsh rule of Jewish Law his parents meted out, and continued to avoid Christian thought like the plague.  Christianity was so reviled in his house that the word "Jesus," he claimed, would have gotten anyone who said it thrown out into the cold.  

And so he became a philosophy student, studying first at Harvard, then at Yale for his higher  degrees, avoiding most religious thought besides an occasional foray into the superstitions of primitive-minded people.  I myself, having gone through advanced training in the social  sciences, can vouch for that: religion to my professors, with one exception, was a study in myth that had practical side-effects, but did most certainly not describe anything actual, like gods or, heaven forbid, a God. Needleman read Kierkegaard, for instance, thinking that he understood him, but ignored the fundamentally religious tone of the arguments.  A product of his time, Needleman could not fathom that a great mind, one that was not buried in the superstitions of antiquity, could possibly take the notion of God seriously. Such it is still, for those who are more educated and, we might assume, wiser.  

Fortunately for him - so he himself says - the only job he could get after grad school was at San Francisco State teaching the history of Western thought, which, until the last few centuries, was entirely based upon the nature of God.  Hating every minute of it, he forced himself to read Jewish mysticism and, most hated of all, The Confessions of St Augustine, a book that informs much of Christian thought to this day.  And with that, like a child who is forced to do something "good" against his will, he found that there was truth in the old religions.  Not only truth, but layers and layers of truth that spoke to each person as he became more aware, leading the attentive student closer and closer to the ultimate reality we call God.  And so, an abiding feeling that he had had as a child was reborn in the realization of the wisdom of the ancients, and of the mystics and saints.

And so we are today, better in some ways, but worse in others, for as we escape from some injustice, whether obviously real like bigotry, or something associated in our minds, like Catholicism and nasty nuns, we often throw out the baby with the bath water.  For those of us of the intellect, we wish to throw away the annoyances of petty, family religion, doing so before we understand the wisdom behind the centuries of gifted men and women who have gone before us, and who have given us more than we could ever find ourselves.  It was, I have to say, much the same for me: it has only been in recent years that the fathomless depth of the sacred religious texts have begun to show themselves to me.  Before then, I read French philosophy and thought I was smart; now I read the religious texts, or those who have studied them better than I could, and have come to realize how little I really know. 

Needleman and I were just a few of so many other well-educated 'ants' that could not see beyond their own little ant hill, because of their own life stories, stories that would have told them (us) more if they had waited until maturity to examine them.  But, in the way of wisdom, we do not live in mature times.  We have corrected the comparatively petty and forsaken the great.  I thank Needleman for making this so painfully clear, and am eager to read more.  FK     

My old pal Jim, who readers might  remember from personal essays, had a pile of R. Crumb comic books when we were in high school (still has them, as collector's items) that we thought were hilarious.  In retrospect, Crumb seems a horrible man with more complexes than a floor at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, but he had some keen insights in his own perverse, cynical way.  In one episode, his hapless character 'White Man' is succumbing to the impossibilities of "cosmic duality," moaning with his head in his hands, when Mr Natural smacks him on the head or some-such, and skips along on his merry way.  No problem for Mr Natural, who takes it as it comes and just "keeps on truckin' '' (In one episode, Mr Natural receives oral sex from a baby and shrugs - 'Hey, it felt good.'  Not exactly status quo.)  Despite the cynical flair, Crumb had a good point: why stress over the unknowable?

Towards the end of Gerald May's book Will and Spirit, he rocks the reader's world with a lengthy discussion of evil.  Why is there evil in a world made and ordered by perfect Goodness?  As the author points out, in the non-dual state, everything seems perfect just as it is; while in the dual state (our ordinary way), evil certainly does exist.  While we are frightened by his exposition of evil, and how we, too, are susceptible, May makes a very Mr Natural observation: the unitive and the dual exist, the latter within the former.  Both are real.  As F Scott Fitzgerald said, the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing views in mind at once.  Here, we are being told to do just that - to hold both the notion of a perfect world and an imperfect world in mind at the same time, and stop trying to work it out logically.  It will not, says May, be worked out logically.  If you think you have worked it out, you have missed out on the unitive, which takes us to the threshold of God and his mystery, which is not knowable in any dualistic, human fashion.  

Of course this it true.  But it brings to mind the impossibility of normal life for a seeker of ultimate knowledge.  May, following William James, believes that there are two types of spiritual people: the once-born and the twice-born.  The once-born take their childhood Bible lessons seriously, and never doubt them in later life.  Those of a more intellectual bent don't think much of these types, but May makes it clear that theirs is the easiest, and perhaps more blessed, path.  The Twice Born, on the other hand, are forced to question that which cannot be known discursively. They are Crumb's  "White Man," and they often tie themselves into knots trying to figure out what cannot be figured out. Their's is a long and tortured route through false humility, false spirituality, and very real intellectual pride.  They are often open to the evil that is active in this world, and sometimes fall prey to it. They need, as do all of us, some form of spiritual guidance, but they often cannot accept this person or that religion because it falls short of a certain imagined perfection.  

The Twice-Born are, of course, the seekers.  The failings of the Once-Born are fairly obvious - they fall prey to self-righteousness and  bigotry and, in some cases, to delusions and idolatrous worship of charismatic leaders who lead them into horror.  But the pitfalls of the Twice-Born are greater in number and harder to unravel.  These people, too, need direction, but find it difficult to give themselves to any one director or spiritual tradition.  They are set up to fall, if not careful, into the gross cynicism of R. Crumb.

When I was young and hitching about the country, I hoped to find a guru, someone who would expose the mystery and make sense of it.  But as the saying goes, a master comes to one when one is ready.  For the seeker, however, when does he know that he is ready?  For in becoming a student, one must succumb to the teachings of the master, and this requires a humility that is often not present in the intellectual pride of the Seeker.  And so on and on it goes - the seeker struggles with everything, just like White Man.  

Perhaps, then, for us Twice Born, it would be best to not struggle, but to accept both the teachings as they are presented to us, along with our intellectual doubts.  The dual mind of the curious will never be satisfied with the answers that only come from Unity, for they conflict.  Perhaps the seeker then must show real intelligence, to be able to hold two opposed thoughts in his mind, and get on with what is being offered beyond himself and his rationalizations.  It is at least a good beginning - although, in the end, just a thought.  FK                   

As I sit before the window seeing gloomy skies and rain - again - I remember the melancholy my father increasingly fell into on Christmas Eve.  When I noted this to my mother one year, she said he was remembering all those times and people now gone. For him, Christmas Eve had become something of a wake, made worse, I suppose, by us younger people singing and carrying on. 

I understand this better now with my own heavy weight of years, but the question remains - why was my father's sadness at its worst on Christmas Eve?  Sure, there were those early years when he must have gone to see the tree (in the Depression in the city, did those many poor even have trees?), or at least something festive where Santa (again, his parents were of a tough breed - was there anything festive in their cold-water flat?) would leave presents - at least an orange - the next day.  There would be his memories of a more prosperous life, when friends would come around to drink and sing, and also of those lonely years he spent on Guam in WWII, where all he could do was dream that he would make it home someday - and of his friends who would not.  There would be memories of Mom and Dad, of his childhood dog, of the first kids born as he jumped into the post-War hustle of hope and anxiety for a better life.  There would be all these things, and Christmas, I suppose, served as a neural nexus, a link with all his life that had gone before, because it is supposed to be a  time of love and cheer.  And when those people and times that had been loved vanish with time, Christmas Eve would then become the perfect time for sad nostalgic remembrance.  

We all know this; it is a classic American time of melancholy, but I think something more was and is going on.  Christmas Eve is not only a time for parties, for friends and family to gather and remake bonds that, however faulty they may be, fill our lives; it is also, for Christians, supposed to be a time of good cheer because the beginning of the end of woeful ignorance is supposed to be near.  We believe, after all, that God came down on Earth this one fantastic time to relieve humans of their separation from God, and to issue in paradise, either here on Earth, or shortly afterwards in heaven, or both.  "But how," the cynic might ask, "is that workin' our for ya'?"  Could it be that Christmas Eve is also a time to ponder how paradise has not, and probably will not, come in our lifetime on earth? How dreams have failed?  How life brings more disappointment than fulfillment, and then drives the final nail in with ill health, old age and death?

Last night I was (almost) forced to watch the Republican debate because a friend who did not have cable wanted to see it, and I acquiesced.  It was much better than expected and was worthy, in balance, of my time.  Still, it was (as it should be) nothing but the scrum of politics - where the hopeful candidates tell us how bad we have it, or at least how insufficient life now is, and how much better off we will be with them in the driver's seat.  But we know we won't be that much better off, at least not on a large scale, and most of us also know that no politician of any party will ever bring us happiness, let alone joy and fulfillment.  That task is, and always has been, our own.  And most of us find that we are as incapable of bringing that about as the politicians.  It is why we invest so much hope in  them, even though we know that we will be disappointed.  We simply have to hope.

And that, I think, is the deeper reason for Christmas Eve melancholy.  Who more than the son of God could bring us what we need?  After feeling hope for so many years, could anything be more natural than to give up as life's end closes in and we have not found that golden ring, that magical key to happiness and fulfillment?  It is promised every year, and every year is not delivered.  The luster is lost to despair, as most two term presidents discover, for neither the son of Man, nor political Man, ever seems to deliver on their promises.  

In the latest book I have been reading, and have not finished because of Christmas season chores (and a political debate), psychiatrist Gerald May (Will and Spirit) tells us that all of us have "peak" experiences - ecstatic union - but we generally sublimate them because the ego is terrified of losing its lofty position as the only thing that is US.  But this ego, as important as it is, knows deep down that it is peripheral to Being.  To sublimate is, by definition, not to forget, but to hide.  But union is the ultimate joy; it is the exact gift that God promised through Christ (or other ways in other religions), and it has been delivered.  We simply do not want to recognize it out of fear.  We want it and need it desperately, but as long as the Ego is king, and not God, we will make up our own temporal version of paradise - of fame, success, love - that can never be adequate, for we know from our hidden experiences that there is something more - much more.

That "much more" is the promise of Christmas.  It is its loss, through our own doing, that we mourn most when melancholy strikes on Christmas Eve, because it is then that we are most reminded of what we can have but cannot endure, through our own fear. But it is there.  The promise has been kept.  And it is for us to find our way back to it.  

Christmas should not be a time of sadness, then, but of renewed energy; it is, after all, the time when the sun has passed its nadir and is returning with more light.  Chirstmas might best be seen as a reminder, not of past times and of dreams gone, but of the dream to find, and this time, to keep.  Despair is one thing; a holy task, to find our own grail, is another.  It is our most rewarding and most difficult quest.  Christmas reminds us that God is willing to find a way for us, if we recognize the calling that is hidden in our melancholy.  FK       

                    

It was with some trepidation that I rented the movie last Friday.  It was about writer David Foster Wallace (titled "The End of the Tour"), whose name was easy to remember, as my best friend from high school had the first two names, and another friend the last.  Otherwise, as with most names, the author would have been forgotten by me, for who really has read David Foster Wallace?

I know who. He is considered the "writer's writer," someone who lived in such rarefied air that only the glitter-otty could appreciate him - and appreciate him they did (and still do).  But I am not of their numbers, not by a long shot.  I don't like most modern art (which started in the 1890's - and it still hasn't caught on with the public) or performance theater or other such moddish things - although I did get caught up in the rage of post-structuralism in grad school, but I was then younger and more foolish.  No, most of this stuff is, to me, worthless; mere attempts to push into pointless  new territory that has nothing to do with me and, as far as I can see, reflects only pure ego.  

But that is not why I feared the Wallace movie.  I had heard of him while driving to the lumber store to buy pressure-treated wood to build a wagon to haul manure and wood, when I clicked on NPR.  They were having a post-mortum celebration of Wallace on the anniversary of his suicide at the age of 46.  The praises!  One of the greatest of the last one hundred years in English literature!  Unique, wonderful, eye-popping: the praise was unending.  Of course I had to get his book.

The local public library had to get it through library loan, so I waited for a week for his opus, Infinite Jest.  Its one thousand pages did not daunt me - I had, after all, read War and Peace and actually had liked it.  And the first 40 or so pages had me interested.  There was not a dull moment, and I could see why writers loved him.  Like Hemingway's work for more recent times, there was nothing lost in his verbiage, nothing extraneous to take away the impact of the emotions he was portraying.  He was, indeed, a master of his craft. But I couldn't make it past the first one hundred pages exactly because of the immediacy of the emotions, because the emotions were so absolutely repulsive.  I will not even try to describe how that was, but the world he painted was so alien, so terrifying in its ordinariness, so foul that I could not make myself live in it for another 100 pages, let alone another 900.  But the book had made a big impact, and I understood how a writer who was feted as one of the world's greatest would kill himself at the height of his fame.  I, too, could not live with a mind like that.

The movie, however, portrayed a more human Wallace, one who was flush with complexes but very likable in his oddness.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in authors.  It is told through an interviewer from Rolling Stone who, bravely I think, allowed himself to be portrayed as an asshole so that we might sympathize with his subject, and at that the movie succeeded brilliantly.  We learn more about fame, jealousy, and what makes, in retrospect, for a good life.  It does not bring us close to the edge, but to the normal contemplation of ego vs The Meaning of Life, that Big Picture that is as true as it is trite, and never exhausted.  But it left out, I believe, the real Wallace, who only near the end tells of his stay in the asylum, of the horror of coming to the end of meaning and finding nothing.

Someone like me screams out, "But David - this was your chance!  You were on the edge of True Consciousness!  Do not kill yourself!," but that is easy to say when one is not suffering from deep depression and madness.  Fame means nothing in such a condition,as we learn from the last scenes of the movie. Here, the interviewer exposes his jealousy for Wallace's genius, and Wallace replies, "You don't want to be me."  Read his greatest book and I think most would agree.  

But thoughts of Wallace and the literary elite brought up my old friend with the odd name, Fritsjoff Schuan.  A Swiss scholar of religion, and a devout practitioner  of mystical Islam, he despised modernity, claiming that art took its first direction downward during the Renaissance.  This is exactly when most of us think that art got good, but he explains that, before that, art was done for its meaning.  Most painters upheld traditions, such as iconography, that were formulated over the centuries to convey the being of God, and humans within it.  They were most often anonymous, and that was the way it should have been.  The art was not to show off the genius of the artist, but the wonder of the world.  It was comparatively crude, but spiritually compelling.  

Art since the Renaissance, on the other hand, increasingly looked to glorify the skill of the artist.  With time, it culminated in "modern" art, which has bored or sent into giggles the average viewer for over a century.  In writing, it went from often anonymous works, like The Cloud of Being, to the 19th century adventure pieces, to the increasingly dark, psychologically focused novels of the 20th.  By the late 20th, the "good" books had largely fallen in to the philosophy that life is insanely erratic, meaningless in a weird, coincidental way, as if there could possibly be a God, but only God as Jester.  In this world, things are eerily magical, but nothing makes sense; it is a world of hapless madness.  The style with these books has got to be breathless, to show-off great linguistic mastery.  

And thus, at its peak, we find David Foster Wallace, although no one could say that his art was contrived.  On the contrary, his madness fit the template of the modern novel, and he, by that same magical coincidence of the modern novel, became its crowned prince.  But because it was genuine, Wallace had to live with the real-life consequences of his vision, and he found that he could not. I don't blame him.  But I do wonder at the cutting edge of our cultural elite, at their embrace of a philosophy that goes no where beyond the ego or beyond the complex twisting of the our constantly changing social system - and indeed, feeds into a downward spiral that could not end well.  Maybe for a few, who are proclaimed geniuses by their peers, but not for society at large.  

This is why Schuan, the curmudgeon, despised the notion of evolution - not for its biological workings, but for the concept it brought to society that we are always getting better, always progressing.  A look at Wallace and our cultural avatars, those whose elitist ideas we are supposed to follow, gives reason to Schuan's anti-modernist views. Considering Wallace and many of our guiding lights of art and culture, it is hard to argue against him.  FK              
      

Today, part II of the short story, "The Wall," under Essays in the web site.  It is at the end of part I, in the normal sequence.  FK  

Yes, our good old friend, envy.  As a kid, I envied the guys with  the new bicycle or BB gun.  As a teen, it was the super jock with all the girls and friends.  Later, the smartest guy in the department, and then the most successful.  Now, the person who, by some miracle beyond my reach, hits the New York Times best-seller list.  

It's always lurking around the corner, and it can eat people up - even, in a few extreme cases, to have women steal another's baby.  In many traditional cultures, envy causes the Evil Eye, which can cause illness, disaster, or death in those who are envied, so much so that mothers of healthy children in some middle east nations hide their babies beneath blankets when they go out in public.  I like to think that I never carried it to an extreme (internally - no knives or evil eye here), but that has probably not always been the case.  It is almost always aimed at people who have what we think we want, which causes the dissatisfaction that is envy.

But not always.  I have mentioned before how it has become clear to me that some people are just better than I - not richer or better looking or more successful (although there are, of course), but simply better human beings.  And surprisingly, this "better" does not cause envy, or at least not the poisonous kind that leads to self-hatred or contempt.

I was reminded of this when my wife and I were walking on a trail an hour north of our place, treading on thin mud to look off cliffs shrouded in fog. She was going to help out at a funeral this Thursday, one for a woman of 86 who died fairly suddenly and without an exceptional amount of pain (as far as we know). Nothing unusual, then, but when she tried to describe to me who she was, she said, "you know, the one with the [mentally challenged] daughter who always had her hair done up with ribbons."  Then she went on. "You know, she started a home for these kids and has helped care for them for decades.  She's the one who always had the brightest smile, always pleasant."

And she was right.  She was one of those women who, although I did not know of her greater efforts, always had struck me as one of those "better" people.  Knowing then what else she did left me feeling even more helplessly beneath her.  The idea of caring for several mentally challenged adults all the time takes my breath away. Children are one thing - as much a nuisance as they can be, they are growing and becoming, and like any farmer, we might not mind the bother of care because we are expectant of the results. Mentally deficient children, however, are (from my perspective) going nowhere.  They will not grow into something else.  And yet this woman not only took what she got from her pregnancy, but took on several more.  In spite of this, she was a far kinder, and happier, person than I have ever been.  

This kind of better elicits no dark envy, however.  On the face of it, that might be because we would not want that cross to bear, and so toss out cheap kudos to someone like her with a sigh of relief - thank God it's not me!   But it seems there is something else going on.  She was happier in her burden than I without, and would be, I suspect, without the burden as well.  Instead, she was one of those very few whose good deeds did not come from obligation or a desire to chalk up heavenly, or social, credits, but whose bearing and deeds came from inside; one of those whose behavior emanated from an interior love simply and unpretentiously. 
 
It is that kind of "better" that raises a different kind of envy - one that seeks to improve the self in a way that improves all others naturally, without striving or resentment.  It is this kind of envy that makes us understand what that overused word, love, really means.  And it is that kind of love that the religions talk of; the kind that so dominates the interior landscape that there can be no fight or hard-won choice to do good.  It just comes naturally.  

Instead of making us feel disgruntled, this kind of envy makes us feel better, for we see in it a direction for ourselves and for the world. It makes us understand what true spirituality is all about and what it's true goal is - a happiness within that causes happiness without, a natural expression of the true spirit. There is no room in such people for holier -than - thou condemnations or guilt trips, nor for saintly self-satisfaction over burdens shouldered, but only for their unsullied selves.  Such people elicit the only envy I am proud of, and the only kind in which I feel blessed for its arousal. For I then know that somewhere in the murk that is me, there is this that burns as a hidden light that is only waiting to be released.  FK        

  

In Will and Spirit by Gerald May, the author makes one of those profiles that are supposed to fit each of us into one or a combination of several psychological types.  May claims that these types are produced by how we handle a perceived rejection of unconditional love in our early childhood.  Briefly, he finds that we fall into one of 3 categories: 1) the rebel, who rebuffs others so that he will never be hurt again; 2) the Obsessive-compulsive, who believes by doing everything just so, love will not be lost; and 3) the dependent, who believes that love can be  maintained by giving up will to another.  Looking at these categories with as clear an eye as possible, I found that I would fit into #1 the most, but not exclusively.  This type would be the rugged individualist, an old American ideal.  Still, age has taught me that I am not complete, and even in youth I always held out hope that a great love was on the horizon, and that maybe an attitude of #2 or #3  might obtain and keep it.  

But really, these profiles did not seem that insightful to me, as with most lists of broad categories.  Rather, it was a question that the author asked later on : why do we turn to the spiritual? Again, being as honest as I could be, I quickly wrote down reasons that I had never really thought about, and came up with these: for a greater Love, for Beauty; as well as for security, for an answer to my fears of death, and for the intellectual security of knowing where I am in a world that is, on deeper thought, an outrage to quotidian ways of thought.  

On final consideration, it came down to love and beauty, the two being parts to a whole.  It is what one encounters in a unitive experience.  Gerald May repeatedly claims that ALL of us have had unitive experiences, but that these experiences are often repressed because as great as they are, they threaten the ego. As he says, though, even if we repress our experiences, and despite fears, the experiences linger in the unconscious, and we strive, nearly all of us, to return to this.  Seeking the spiritual, then, regardless of our protective psychological screens, is not to seek the security and "oneness" of the womb, as some psychologists have claimed, but is rather an effort to return to a desired state that we all, at times, have had in maturity.  

In short, I believe that identifies what we seek pretty well.  But there are pathologies that obscure this seeking, which will be treated in the next chapters to come in May's book, and they include such infamous leaders as Jim Jones and Michael Karesh (Waco shoot-out), as well as another phenomena that is relevant to what is happening now: violent Muslim jihad.  What, might we ask, are these people seeking?  It is not, clearly, love and beauty.

Perhaps the answers will come in the following chapters, and if so, I will pass those on in another blog.  As it is, I have read the Muslim mystics, and they are as deep and real as those from any other religion.  As a Christian, I am somewhat disturbed over the violence of Mohammad, the founding prophet, but this is clearly not what compels most Muslims to worship.  Rather, I believe that they, too, are seeking this love and beauty, and I am in no way trying to be politically correct in saying this.  But the violent ones, besides some of the obviously psychotic leaders, are angry; and anger comes from both a feeling of impotence and of fear, a fear in this case that concerns the very existence of the social-cosmic world of the believers.  As such, when reporters ask the question, "what could have possibly been the motive?" it seems that they are ignorant of social and religious crises, and how deeply they are rooted.  The Jihadist, it appears, by in large are immature people who fear a world that is consuming their ancient and sacred traditions. They might be labelled #2 on the list made by May - obsessive compulsives who would rather die than have their routines disturbed - routines which they think connect them to both their tribal roots and to Allah.  The modern world is disturbing the ancient ways of doing things" just so," just as it has disturbed all the other major religions.  

Just why it is that Muslims, almost alone now, should have these pan-world violent sects is rooted in history and perhaps the nature of the founding prophet himself, but one thing is clear - the bad guys have forgotten the very foundation of what they seek: the love and beauty they have encountered in those peak moments of unity.  If only they could remember this, they would understand that the particulars of their tradition are only window dressing for what they really seek.  But just try to take away an obsessive-compulsive's security blanket - that is when the fighting usually gets more intense.  Would only that the great wise men and women of Islam could stand up and address this issue with the same power as the power-hungry theocratic Immans.  It might be the best hope.  FK