My MoMA top 8

Egon Schiele, "Girl with Black Hair" (Mädchen mit schwarzem Haar, 1912). Certainly a work that grabs one's attention, or at least my male gaze. There's a shimmer, a rippling detail that you can glimpse in the purple passages if you peer closer. That hue was not easy to see even under the light at the current exhibition (March 27-July 11, 2011) of "German Expressionism: the Graphic Impulse," which Layne and I went to see at New York's Museum of Modern Art, last Sunday, however.

Schiele's appealed to me for his blowsy, restless, fevered, woozy images of desire. His disheveled bodies, especially his satiated or satiating young women, naturally (!) may appeal to my sensibilities, or most men for all I know. Yet, he more than most artists also brilliantly captured his own consumption of the soul, the inner frenzy that distorted and distended his body and those of his models, including tender ones of his wife and child. He combined the before-and-after states of sexual longing and erotic limitations unforgettably. A century later, it's easy to see why he's still controversial, and perhaps why I felt uneasy in public looking for so long at his women, clothed and unclothed, and half in-between. 

Often I don't get much more of an impression in front of a work (except maybe marvelling at its size vs. what I'd expected. I'm sick of Frieda Kahlo as anyone from the neighborhoods where the trendy arrivistes blend into my city's Eastside natives-- and immigrants, more to the point-- might be), but I was surprised how tiny her two portraits were as I rushed past them, as so much at MoMA. I feel like a philistine, but I like my 20c art figurative, I like watercolors, and as you can tell here, the eight works out of hundreds scanned and skimmed that remained most with me prove fanciful, bold, and/or (3:8) nude females. Frida excepted.

Egon Schiele,  "Nude with Violet Stockings and Black Hair"  (Akt mit violetten Strümpfen und schwarzem Haar, 1912) A more tender, reflective moment? I th0ught about this woman, this canvas, this atelier, where sometime this was created the same year my godfather was born in stockyard-adjacent immigrant Chicago.  The naturalism of the novel, the experimental art, both likely expressed in a manner no upright Catholic back then might have even dared to imagine (supine lapsed Joyce with or without his Nora notwithstanding!) 

What a difference between my godfather's upbringing and the bohemian demi-monde of the Kaiser and Emperor's final reign. Juxtaposed with Schiele's other 1912 black-haired nude, I admired both versions of dark-haired sirens. For this, he looked down a ladder at his model. And for such as this, he was briefly imprisoned for morals charges consorting with minors, pornography, the sort that led to his reputation.

Otto Dix, "Shock Troops Advance Under Gas," (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor) from The War (Der Krieg, 1928-32, 50 total prints) They all went to war, the men in this exhibit. Many volunteered.

Some died, some were invalidated, some lost it. All suffered. Schiele by comparison was lucky, transferring to a desk job in the Austrian army so he could keep drawing and painting. No wonder the Dual Monarchy with its double-eagled symbol, distracted, two directions at once, no one-track mind, lost the war.

The caption at Schiele's mini-bio at the German Expressionism MoMA site concludes: "Exhibition at Vienna Secession in March 1918 heralded financial and critical success. Seven months later, at age twenty-eight, succumbed to the influenza pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife." I wonder what happened to Schiele's lissome, dissolute, supple models.

After the war, this acid etching represents one out of a horrific series. The women as well as the men in these scenes, bloated, starving, gnawed, grappling, show other contortions after the poses of Schiele and his bold circle succumbed to rictus, syphilis, TB, the flu, and rigor mortis. This project by another, far more long-lived, veteran reminds me of and compares to Goya's anti-war prints. The corrosive composition suits bitterly the subject: form and content blend into a sharp, graphic illustration.

Max Pechstein, "The Lord's Prayer," (Das Vater Unser, 1921) (complete portfolio as slideshow at this link). This titles twelve woodcuts. They take Martin Luther's version of the prayer and simply tell its story. I was moved by this. The simplicity and elegance of the raw depictions speaks well for the humanity that needed to be restored after so much devastation. As with Eric Gill's British designs, Pechstein's direct, angular, medievalist, awkward, sharp images may not as appealing on the surface. So, check out the series via the hyperlink; it grows on you as you follow its familiar path along those venerable verses. This exhibit after hundreds of evocations of horror and exposure needed this gentler post-war chastening.

And, after so much relentless angst, lust, and tension, we left this special display of German outbursts for the permanent, if no less agitated, collections on other floors below. Not as much halted my roving eye as I thought. Even if this shows my aesthetic retardation, I prefer earlier, more representational periods to much of abstracted modern art, I confess, and on a crowded April (I can't imagine this place in summer or the holidays) Sunday afternoon in two-and-a-half hours, you do reach overload soon, especially if footsore, jet-lagged, and harried. So, four more that I record for my own recollections...

Amedeo Modigliani, "Reclining Nude" (1921). A new biography proves again what a roue he was to his women, but this one, rounder and less elongated than the woman depicted in another painting by him next to it, reveals a kinder side to him, I hope. The reddish tones stood out yet softened the impact on the eye. It's a golden, glowing work, compared to many which draw upon or remain in darker, muted tones.

Paul Klee,  "Cat and Bird" (1928). I learned in my "Studies in the Contemporary American Novel" freshman lit class in college how Klee's "The Twittering Machine" defined modernism as capturing the inside of the character as what's revealed, not the pictorial-photographic attempts of realism and naturalism that sought to pile up vividly rendered exact details from one's observations. Here, with the bird "inside" the feline's head, we can see this strategy at work.

When I got back to L.A. the following day after my visit, my two cats were the pestiest they'd ever been, especially Gary, whose intent, composed, yet slightly awry, green-eyed gaze resembles Klee's kitty, to have me upstairs to cuddle them, or at least so he (less so sister Mary) could sit on my chest and fall asleep after being fed by me. They'd refused the ample food left out for them in my absence. I
gave Gary extra cat treats shaped like fish, as here reproduced artfully if less tangibly and tastily.

James Ensor,   "Tribulations of Saint Anthony"  (1887).  I stood in front of this the longest. It was more respectable a passage spent peering than my elapsed and then repeated stays in front of Schiele's paired nudes. For decades, I've liked Ensor's "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889" similar send-up now at the Getty Museum.

Anyone who knows me well could (as my wife predicted when she'd caught up with me) figure I'd camp out here. Many small squiggles as with the devil falling high over the center, the inflated marginal figure, the romping satyrs, entwined debauchees, the floating, half-visible Blue Meanie Peter Max apparitions, take time to surface from the chaos of this wonderful vision. One painting worth visiting, at nose-length at least for myopic me. This is one work meriting a much larger reproduction and a magnified resolution.

Dorothea Lange,  "Mother and Child" (1954). This amid a magpie's heap of photos in a special exhibit of women photographers from the dawn of the camera. This crammed arrangement of so many disparate images reminded me of what "Songs by composers who happened to be gay" might sound like on a CD-box set. That is, so varied that I'd miss the (essentialism as destiny or savvy niche marketing?) sales pitch.  (Yet, I've seen jazz and classical compilation collections aimed straight at this "sexual preference" cohort.)

But, a handful of those again who know me, if fewer than for Ensor's choice by me, may recognize why I cottoned to this out of a wall of Lange's iconic images. Even if I had not seen the place labeled where it was shot, San Francisco, the title and the time period arrested my glance enough for this to make the final cut.  I did a bit of research: it's Market Street with one of its streetcars passing, the edge of the Emporium department store seen, those two stores (are there any non-chains left anywhere in any downtown?) now replaced by the massive mall that's the SF Center. 

I'll leave it to discretion rather than say why, but this photo remained with me, the last seen in this array of eight chosen which I wanted to frame in my own private gallery for you and me to share.

Colin Thubron's "Shadow of the Silk Road": Book Review

Retracing his youthful trek, this veteran travel writer charts conversations and shares sights. It starts off powerfully in Xian, at the start of the 7,000-mile route. Without photos, his narrative carries the force of a documentary film's record.

Rome at one end and China at the other, so distant, traded in legends. Silk grew on trees; "vegetable lambs" sprouted overnight cotton. A thousand years of commerce, ended by shipping, Mongol invasions, and alternate routes, left much of the settings he passes in ruins. Others, as in the PRC, obliterate whatever charm, devotion, or value remained. "To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, in a cloud of dust." (31)

He listens to many voices, fluent as he is in Mandarin & Russian. Thubron's strength is how he recounts the slow madness of a young wife who ran away before consummating her marriage, Persian men obsessed with female chastity and Western pornography, a shanghaied survivor of the Taliban and warlords, and polite resisters to Communist oppression or Islamic fundamentalism. The author's British identity marks him as target of entreaties opportunists, lonely men, drunken drivers, a Tibetan monk, eager students, and cunning informers, perhaps. He roams at a time when SARS threatens, and when the Iraqi invasion casts him as a representative, unwillingly, of a different type of inhumanity but one that links him to a long trail of such across the road taken by forces under Genghis Khan, the Shah, Khomeini's forces, Stalin, and the original Assassins.

He sums up on his second traverse of this trail what survives and what does not. The cliff temples of Matisi with a thousand miniature Buddhas as murals have been "defaced by Red Guards, each one scratched with an obliterating cross, as if it were a mathematical equation that hadn't worked out." (79) Near Khotan he tells, too fleetingly, of the strange Tocharian mummies with Celtic-like tartans and Caucasoid features in that desert climate. Among the rebellious Uighir, he feels apart: "Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. . . . Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable. You fear only your failure to understand or to reach where you are going. Sometimes you are moved by a kind of heartless curiousity, which shames you only on your return home. At other times you are touched, even torn; but you move on." (115)

As this traveler's tale continues, the lassitude and oddness of the journey weighs on him and you. He crosses the "shadow-line" as he flies over, given border tensions, the Kyrgyz-Russian-Chinese frontiers, "where the Chinese world elided with the Turkic-- where Uighir dreams simmered, and domes appeared, and people started to talk about God." (156) His stories of the Kyrgyz passes, full of drinking bouts, harrowing brushes with death, and near-pagan vistas of primeval rawness, linger. Tangerine slopes, apricot cliff, turquoise river, coal-black screes: these beckon a certain breed of native and a visitor able to recount their unworldly power. "Some mountains poured to the river in a liquid-seeming waste, the colour of sewage, while others showed crimson and incendiary beyond them, already daubed with snow." (180)

As he continues, paranoia seems to shadow him and his informants. The Chinese fearful of SARS and foreign presences monitor him; the peoples resisting the Communists or the Taliban, the mullahs or the despotic regimes fear his entrance or take him aside as a confidant. Past the ancient divide of the River Oxus, He in Mazar-e-Sharif watches from a hotel window "the still city, which seemed to be glimmering under water. I felt a light expectancy. This, I thought idly, was how people died: by mistake, imagining themselves bodiless." (221)

Such an existential unease grows as he enters Islamist territory. The Mongols left the places they conquered so ruined that even today, on this highway, forgetfulness appears to be the status quo, as it was for different ideologies but similar purposes under Stalin, Taliban, Mao, the Shah, and Khomeini. Nearing Iran:

"For the last time I follow a track into a village and see again how people live. How a seven-year-drought is draining their fields, their crops, their lives. One quarter of their children never reaches the age of five. The average life ends at forty-three. Then all thoughts about brutality and conscience drain away, and the mystery becomes not cruelty, but compassion: why somebody offers a stranger a cigarette, or turns away from killing an enemy's son." (257)

In Tehran, he finds a clandestine humanism, but even a young filmmaker's search for genuine roots withers. He and some friends went one winter to a village to collect picturesque stories and scenes. Thubron quotes him: "But we found those villages had no memories. No stories. There were no lullabies they sang their babies. The songs they sang were the same as ours." (285) So, their film became: "About how there were no stories. How history had disappeared."

Thubron composes his book filled with such vignettes. He tells many stories even as he shows us how history crumbles and ideology stifles imagination. His book will not be the romantic travelogue that his predecessors might have labored a century or two ago to concoct. It can depress, and we may be startled as the author is by his own mirrored reflection late on, hostile eyes, windburned face, dissheveled attire. He makes no easy end of his journey, and his honesty may wear him and us down, but he is faithful in this manner to telling us what he heard, saw, and felt all the long way from the eerie, policed fastnesses of inner Asia to the calmer, tired shores of ancient Antioch. (Posted to Amazon US 4-4-10)

P.S. See his livelier, if as measured and reticent and for me very moving narrative which followed:  "To a Mountain in Tibet" (brief review at this Amazon link). I reviewed it in detail on my blog  and for PopMatters on 2-2-11.

Xinran's "Sky Burial": Book Review

A Chinese woman writing about the invasion of Tibet: this intrigued me. As my sympathies lie not with the PRC, however, I feared sentimentality in what the cover subtitles "an epic love story of Tibet." Epic, yes, even this book's the size of a prayer missal with large print over barely 200 pages. Xinran, after her investigation of women in China today, takes one woman's tale and dramatizes it.

It's a spare saga fitting the spaces it enters. The Red Army medical officer in the wake of the conquest of Tibet finds herself searching for her husband to learn of a fate that a cryptic notice seems to not solve but rather deepen. Isolated with no knowledge of the language, reliant on a Tibetan who knows Chinese, Shu Wen survives as if one of the natives. But, relegated to a largely detached, silent situation, she "sometimes felt like one of the family's animals: protected, gently treated, watered, and fed, but set apart from the human world." (73)

Wen turns slowly Buddhist, but this is very understated. As she lacks often anyone even to talk to for long stretches, she turns inward, almost an internal exile relying on her own wits and the kindness of strangers. This transforms the narrative into a more visual, sensed story than one full of dialogue, reminding me more of cinema at times.

The account moves languidly but quickly, in the sense that decades pass and with a jolt it's suddenly not the end of the 1950s but the middle of the '70s. Time seems to suspend amidst the remote locale where she lives with her protectors, and then, with an encounter with Chinese, her quest resumes to find the fate of her husband. To keep track of her thoughts, in a book of philosophy and on the back of his photo, she writes with the only tool she can scrounge. "The color from the stone pencil was very faint but the stone made such a deep impression that the words were engraved on Kejun's smiling face." (84-5)

Such imagery subtly transmits the connection between her past and present, and the work, modestly, tries to create such a bridge that spans two vastly disparate cultures, ways of thought, and mindsets. It gets a bit didactic when the Chinese who Wen meets try to explain to her the varying "official" reactions to the flight of the Dalai Lama or the stalemate between the two nations, but this may be necessary material for her Chinese readers unfamiliar with nuances in the Communist policy, or foreign readers needing a bit of context. The book introduces a small bit of Tibet to the large Chinese and international audience and it also makes a moving plea for cooperation between the two peoples.

I get the impression that Xinran worked this conciliatory message gingerly but firmly into her story, and I wondered if this related to why she now lives in London. She softens the impact made by the Chinese upon Tibet, and she does try to balance her tale with mentions of Tibetan reprisals and the fear that such actions created among the Chinese enemy. I suspect she tried as much as possible to soften the edges and present a marketable novel to her comrades that she left behind. There lurks perhaps here yet another "true story" blurred into fiction.

After I finished it, I found out it's "based on a true story." It's rather shadowed in the marketing of this title if it's fiction or fact, in fact, and I needed to look up the library classification. Knowing it's rooted in reality encourages me to hope that the subject of the work did indeed contact, as the closing appeals, the author at last. That may provide the happy ending that readers might expect. (Posted to Amazon US 4-28-10)

Diana Mukpo's "Dragon Thunder": Book Review

Chogyam Trungpa's wife's biography inevitably's intimate and reticent. It tells nearly all, yet I felt it held back. The sheer oddness of the marriage between a 16-year old boarding school runaway from an upper-class English family and a refugee lama from Tibet nearly twice her age, soon to become famous for his controversial lifestyle, makes for natural drama. The narrative Mukpo tells (with a co-author who was there for the later period) fills with moments of emotion and commotion. Her life tangles with her Rinpoche; they immerse themselves in a countercultural movement that they then surpass with their own homegrown Shambhala court amidst all the sartorial flair, protocol, and equine trappings of a Gilbert & Sullivan musical.

She tells her life's story clearly if doggedly. Background, as on her family's history, slows the pace down, and those like me who may not be as enthralled by the art of dressage might find the long stretches among horses slow going. Still, her interest in riding as she studies at the Spanish Riding School intersects finally with the Rinpoche's elaboration of his Colorado court; she does her best to explain why he sought to tame the martial showmanship of the court to transform it into a signature method to use aggression to overcome dangerous temptations of the ego.

His life before he fled the invading Chinese as a young man in 1959, his Oxonian education, his tense years in Scotland, his New England and Boulder sojourns, his encounter with Shenryu Suzuki's Zen followers in San Francisco--Diana Mukpo relates these episodes neatly. The book bogs down in daily detail and squabbles among his retinue and between her and family members. However, she hilariously recounts her uncle's rigidity towards her new groom and her mother's concerted opposition that melts in time under his charm. And, the texture of the tension between being the wife of a reincarnated lama, a tulku, and the public persona she must then take on contributes to the varied storyline that her unpredictable life comprises.

Her own years with her husband fill with luxury (a Mercedes, trips to Nice, the Bahamas, a stay at the Ritz among the jetsetting the couple enjoys, although the raising of finances and how they enrich her family in the heyday of his acclaim seem oddly absent from her often warts-and-all recounting), and despair. One of her sons suffers a malady that draws him down; two of her sons are fathered with a man to whom she is not married in an open relationship, if only one to balance the many her husband enjoys in certainly an unconventional marriage in so many ways.

She does sum up the message of her husband: to break down the "spiritual materialism" of Westerners clinging to exotic notions of Buddhism and gurus. Even as Chogyam played up his own celebrity in his invented retinue, he sought to shatter stereotypes, destroy defences, and undermine expectations of how a Tibetan transmitted the dharma to coddled, complacent, yet often sincere and yearning Americans. In this, his wife sees his greatest achievement: giving Westerners the antidote they need in a time of "pain and chaos" that demands honesty and courage. He did this by confronting people and forced them to capitulate, for their own good. His means to this end involved much dodgy behavior, but his "crazy wisdom" at least to his defenders puts him in a venerable lineage of Tibetan teachers of this style.

She may despite revealing much to us not tell us all, and as with his alcoholism that did him in at an early age, it seems she underplays the impact his self-destructive behavior had. But, she strives to be charitable to all involved in this saga. So, she judges him kindly, and readers finishing this thorough presentation (perhaps overly so for those not intimate with her subject, perhaps necessarily elaborated for one so utterly different than the world to which he fled) will understand his impact, his reputation, and his legacy more fully than before. (Posted 3-21-10 to Amazon US)

DK Publishing's "India": Book Review

This visually stunned me. It opens with panoramic vistas and fills pages with imagery. Its text packs lots of learning. While a heavy book in size and contents, it enriches readers and it's surprisingly affordable.

DK lavishes graphics in all its publications, and this approach matches well the wonders of landscape art, architecture, daily life, occupations, sights, religious and mythical tales, and travel highlights that cram these large pages. Evocative verse excerpts top double-page spreads of beautiful photography to open the volume, and alongside such as the Taj Mahal and Khajuraho, the colorful wares of a dye seller, a Ladakh Tibetan Buddhist monastery, a bridal dinner, the makeup worn by a dancer, or the inlay of a Mughal archway gain impact from the enlarged illustrations.
Also, the text, credited to Abraham Eraly, Yasmin Khan, George Michell, and Mitali Saran, explores such topics as the early cities of the Indus, a train driver's day, or a "dabbawallah" who somehow delivers tiffin lunchboxes each day in Mumbai, clearly. The Bhagavad-Gita, for instance, earns excerpts from its second chapter that use Krishna's encouragement to Arjuna to fight in battle that sum up the whole Hindu mindset skillfully.

This relates to one small shortcoming. Lacking a reading list, I am not sure where to turn next to find out more. The translation of the B-G is noted in the acknowledgments along with a couple of the poems earlier cited, and there's an index and photo credits, but a supplemental guide to films, books, or other media could have been inserted. The travel guide at the end whets one's appetite to visit, but the illustrated maps can be hard to read, drawn engagingly though they may be with art and color in a style that reminds me of lush coffee-table tomes of my childhood of faraway places. The binding, as earlier reviewers on Amazon mention, is noteworthy, but the book might be scuffed or dented easily-- so I'd keep it away from the coffee under the table. But I'd also take it out and read it from cover to cover, for browsing the art will lure you into the print quickly. (Posted to Amazon US 3-20-10. May be hard to find by the generic title, so see my permalink.)

Noah Levine's "The Heart of the Revolution": Book Review

Bluntly, boldly, this urges Buddhists to adapt its “radical teachings on forgiveness, compassion, and kindness.” Readers of Noah Levine’s streetwise memoir Dharma Punx (2004: [see my review at Amazon US]) will find in his third book a familiar blend of sharp talk and elevated reflection. There, Levine began by facing a third felony at seventeen as a petty thief, crack addict, and disgruntled punk. He told of his recovery, enriched by his understanding of the meditative practices his father, noted American Buddhist expounder Stephen Levine, encouraged him to test out.  Gradually, Noah found himself transformed, if no less rebellious. He channeled his anti-social despair into a desire to better himself and the world by radical, if wiser, action. 

While his memoir (mirroring in tone if not approach Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen [see my review at Amazon US] emphasized his own hardships and his Asian travels in search of meaning, it lacked detail about this dharma-teaching as opposed to the punk side of his formation. His maturation, fluently channeled as Against the Stream:  A Manual for Buddhist Revolutionaries (2007: [see my Amazon US review]) provided audiences with a calmer, far more nuanced introduction to what, for a few committed readers, could turn them towards liberation. In this second book  as with this new one, he reduces autobiography. He blends his own life-lessons deftly, but sparingly, into a discussion directed increasingly at audiences already convinced about Buddhism.  

Furthermore, Levine aims this study at the “1%ers,” the fraction of the committed whom the Buddha sought to convert. Levine aligns himself with fellow radicals bold enough to disregard religious pieties and social conformity. As a recovering addict, he defines this study into the reinvention of one’s self as detached from attachment to pleasure. (An addict cannot “just say no,” and cannot separate the thought that beckons from the desire that must be quenched.) Levine grounds his approach towards sober, but joyful awareness in the insight meditation that for twenty-two years has guided his path.

After ten years of practice, Levine struggled to forgive those whom he had wronged and who had done him wrong. In Dharma Punx and Against the Stream, he narrated how he went back to make amends. He admits in The Heart of the Revolution that his Buddhist commitment had nevertheless lacked a crucial element. His third book explains what it took him ten more years to learn after ten years as a Buddhist. Levine’s lessons on mindfulness transcend his meditative practices (appended in Against the Stream and somewhat repeated here) to an engagement with one’s self and with others that connects with “citta,” the heart-mind of Buddhism. 

Sixteen chapters brief enough to be sampled each at once, long enough that they combine inspirational suggestions with often practical advice drawn from his study and his life, direct the reader into this hidden treasure. Meditation serves as the shovel; the treasure unearthed gets polished and refined into the heart-practice that as “metta,” or loving-kindness, expresses itself in disciplined contemplation leading to skillful action. (As no summation of Buddhist doctrine begins this book, Against the Stream might be studied first by any reader new to Levine; he also sums up Dharma Punx in that second book.)

Rope burns resemble attachment: you hang on to what you grasp. You hurt yourself if you don’t let go. “Nonattached appreciation” of the good, Levine counsels, replaces clinging. Similarly, pain will not go away, but suffering may, for that is how people hang on to pain, by reacting to it with instinctual aversion.  The essence of Buddhism, compared by Levine to the self as but a rainbow, seemingly real but lacking substance as we behold it, offers this fundamental teaching. 

Levine, more than Brad Warner’s Zen, nearer Stephen Batchelor’s philosophy as expressed in Buddhism without Beliefs [see my blog review or Amazon US] and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist [see my blog review or Amazon US], relies upon a non-theistic reaction to reject “buying merit or worshiping deities or teachers” that deludes most Buddhists. Levine urges readers to “abandon the unskillful and cultivate the good” by turning to the mind and heart rather than obeying power or gurus. The dharma’s direction emanates neither from divine revelation nor appeal to authority, but as “verified truth” tested by the practitioner, as the Buddha directed, before its sensible prescriptions could be taken as healing medicine by the suffering patient.

This book translates conventional responses of “faith” into more appropriate terms for secular seekers. “Inspiration” and “confidence” replace ideology or dogma. Perseverance remains a necessary component, to overcome the doubt and fear that tempted even the Buddha, long after his enlightenment. Levine warns how harm will not recede and pain will not vanish for Buddhists. “I see you, Mara” had been spoken over and over by the enlightened Buddha to the force representing hatred, greed, and delusion. His “seeing” Levine interprets as the Buddha’s acknowledgment of the persistence of temptation, and the freedom from hatred and ill will sought by a wiser practitioner of these heart-teachings. What must be learned for the practitioner becomes how to deal with pain, not how to escape from its presence. By not fearing pain, and by not expecting pleasure to endure, one gains balance. 

Brief chapters discuss mercy, compassion, hurt, forgiveness, and types of love. Whereas Against the Stream by its advocacy of celibacy appeared to drastically narrow the potential non-monastic audience able to apply Levine’s teachings into daily action, The Heart of the Revolution corrects this direction. Levine acknowledges, now as a married man and a father, how sexuality may be channeled mindfully into a committed relationship, and this book improves upon its predecessor by his further experience.

The eighth chapter expounds upon each line of Buddha’s discourse called the Metta Sutra. I paraphrase this as the “teaching on lovingkindness.” Levine allows each line of this terse but tender lesson to unfold. He revises traditional reception of a few of its contents. He does not expect magic to swoop petitioners out from harm’s way, for instance, nor does he regard “being born again into this world” as literally as many Buddhists do. 

He reckons how sorrow and joy will both accompany even the wisest Buddhist, yet “in harmony with reality,” Levine hopes that balance will assist the practitioner to adapt its message into everyday good deeds that better one’s self and the conditions of those whom the seeker meets. One freer from “sense desire” learns to love and to let go: not so afraid of losing what one longs for, and not so afraid of what one fears to find.  The gist is to lose the craving for desire, the attachment instinctually bred into holding on to what pleases one’s self while running away from what causes pain. Levine allows flexibility in translating these verses into relevant remarks accessible to Western dharma students. By doing so, he elevates this central portion of his study into a very worthwhile resource. 

The next chapter recalls a powerful parable of how “killing with kindness” works. Levine follows with his own account:  “The young drug addict that I was as a kid is dead. I killed him with metta.” He compares the inventive deployment of kindness to situational ethics, and he anticipates rousing “a handful of committed assassins to inspire a full-fledged war against ignorance.” 

Part three of his book continues his exploration. One drawback persists as Levine does not provide an overview of how he organizes his book. While short, it demands thoughtful reflection. Between chapters, few transitions or cross-references assist the reader.  Levine cites no sources for his translations or other Buddhist texts incorporated. He appends only terse outlines of the essential teachings he enumerates in the text, except for dependent-arising which earns a wonderful extended analogy to craving an ice cream sundae in Against the Stream. That overview will help dharma novices.

The last section titled “Avoiding the Dead End of Religion” shares with Warner and Batchelor’s attitudes a lively suspicion of what 90% of Buddhists, in Levine’s count, fail to understand and to practice. Buddhism serves as a regimen aimed not at appeasing gods or bowing to statues, but at changing the world starting with one’s self. While for many modern adherents Buddhism may begin on the meditation mat, for Levine and his rebels, dharma must push one then out in the world, taking on the messy business of generosity towards “all living beings,” beginning but not ending with one’s self.

Gratitude and the application of mercy and compassion to increase pleasure as “nonattached appreciation” while easing the imposition of pain finds a thoughtful expression. Personal effort and the rare personal opportunity, Levine emphasizes, upon one’s human acquaintance with dharma must embolden readers to act on its teachings. As in Against the Stream, Levine includes the concept of balance in “equanimity” as a crucial factor. Here, he pivots into a consideration of karma in a frank, confrontational, and refreshingly agnostic manner that may show the influence of Batchelor. 

While metta for Levine’s “old-school,” he raises the “new-school” (for him at least) Tibetan exercise of Tonglen. This exemplifies how “black, heavy, hot” pain can be inhaled by the meditator while “white, light, cool” compassion can be exhaled.  Levine’s meditation practices always include how-to details. 

His fourteenth chapter, on the Six Realms of Existence conceived in Buddhist cosmology for all living beings, neatly matches these up with previous chapters on particular heart-mind components. Levine locates analogues “for our varied human existence” as encountered everyday as one moves from an animal or hellish to a godly or hungry-ghost sensibility as we deal with cravings, desires, and moods. 

Then, he sidesteps into how the conventional “poisons” of an existence tethered in this realm may show how human personalities follow one of three main types. He finds a positive spin to balance the trio’s conventional negativity. Therefore, a greedy, craving individual might be praised as confident; a hating, aversive person could turn discerning; a deluded, distracted one could show serenity. 

Finally, Levine sums up his efforts with a reminder to join compassion with wisdom by a heartfelt program of improvement. He urges readers to  get off the mat and put the dharma into true practice. He reminds his readers, given his American Buddhist orientation, how the dharma must now be enlivened.

While readers perhaps of the generation of Noah’s father may not expect the stance taken by his son, who positions himself more from the street than the retreat, both Levines share an enthusiasm for making Buddhist teachings matter for a Western readership disenchanted with slogans and commodities. Noah Levine, for the children and grandchildren of the Sixties revolution, addresses the betterment of one’s wounded society along with one’s self. By losing the insistence upon that fixed self, after all, he follows his father in agreeing that this latest stage in the revolution begins in one’s heart. 

(Posted without the bracketed review links with slight alterations at the New York Journal of Books 4-1-11) 

Sex & Stones

May break my bones? This blog's reviewed earnest accounts by Western Buddhists, Irish republicans and their discontents, scholarly punks, musical marginals, and/or overeducated malcontents moaning across six hundred pages of footnoted density. But I do harbor a broader (no pun intended?), if arcane and misfit, sensibility beyond pet preferences. Today, "foolishly," I'll skim some newly excavated shards about sexuality.

In the New York Times glossy Travel magazine, amid articles touting a Laguna Beach yoga-camp where you could eat 1200 calories a day while yanking your dog up scenic vistas, for a mere $3900 a week (a bargain next to a $5k ashram up/down this coddled, mansed, and condofied fiefdom of the once open access Pacific coast), Sean Penn glowering from noble Haitian relief work, and ways to spend money in London, I stumbled upon Joumana Haddad, by a journalist puffed (if more svelte from her elegantly swathed stance than her tagline's inspiration suggests) as "the Oprah of Lebanon."

Sex and the Souk doesn't delve very deep, but Haddad raises a cogent point among the posing and preening. She does strike me as a bit disingenuous, for as a Christian, why'd she make a big stand about never having worn an hijab, which is a Muslim practice? But given her affluence, her two kids by two different men, and her ambiguously affluent status now due to what seems hinted as a sugar daddy out of her current boudoir, a high life in Beirut's high rises appears to afford her a windowed vista above the city, a corner office, a laptop, and sniper's perch. A scenic vista along another urban coast, from where she can target the chauvinist hordes.

One wonders where sexual politics fits into this volatile setting. “People tell me, ‘There are so many things wrong with the Arab world, why do you just talk about sex?’ And I say, ‘This is the main link.’ Who decides what’s haram — what’s allowed and not allowed? The religious figures. They are linked with the political powers, and together they work to control the society through this medium, the sex drive. If you break the power over sex, you can start undermining and questioning the religious and political powers. You cannot do it the other way around.”

Nina Burleigh gives her subject more attention for her hand-rolled cigs, her "J" tattoo for her own "racy" magazine "Jasad" ("body" in Arabic), and her gushing over Steven Colbert. She'll land five minutes near his televised lap on the inevitable promo tour for her forthcoming tell-all book, I predict.

If Jasad's "articles by intellectuals and poets about masturbation, homosexuality, fetishism and polygamy alongside antique photos of nude Arab boys luxuriating in voluptuous Ottoman settings and close-ups of female genitalia" comprise "tame fare by Western standards," I guess I need to watch less TV, or change the channels more. She claims at twelve that finding de Sade's "Justine" proved her "baptism by subversion." (I'd recommend Joachim Neugroschel's witty Penguin translation of the Marquis' cheerier "Philosophy in the Bedroom," or even "Juliette," over the depressing, decidedly morbid "Justine," but as Haddad mastered it in French, I'll give her the benefit of my doubts, being one language distant from her magazine and another from the decidedly un-erotic, to my tastes, de Sade. His point's not to titillate, but to flagellate, the body politique.)

But at least her comment reminds us of the current, and perpetual, if often undercover, subversion that powers impose to suppress. I've just reviewed Islamic scholar Olivier Roy's "Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways" featured at PopMatters. This French professor might agree with Haddad: the globalization of religious identities as they drift from their cultural moorings may lead to the Net, books, and magazines as media by which change will occur, which no imam, prelate, or eruv can shut out. If people want to believe and behave a certain way, they may find that they can do this from anywhere in the world, with a freedom never afforded their ancestors. The struggle to freely wield the lash, in de Sade vs. Saudi Arabia, certainly invites its own clash of provocations and imprecations.

Any whip my Connacht progenitors raised must have been against only a cow or horse. So I reckon, even though my maternal line appears to have been feisty enough to provoke paternal lack of paternalistic pacifism. My ancestors never likely met up with Jewish traders let alone Buddhist adherents. Although I possess a great-great grandmother with a bonafide Traveller (don't call them Tinkers or "Irish Gypsies") surname and provenance.

With the exception of a few Scouts in one place I partly (!) grew up, where college town sophisticates mingled with us barely non-gypsy rubes (my best friend had a pet goat, my family couldn't stop breeding pups, and two neighbors smelled up the still then semi-rural acreage with two horses), I'd remained ignorant long, never seeing a bagel until college. I met non-Catholic friends only in grad school. As Diarmaid Ferriter documents in Occasion of Sin: Sex and society in modern Ireland, reviewed by me at The New York Journal of Books, within my diasporic "living memory," the impositions of the Church weighed upon many of us who were raised in supposedly post-Vatican II guitar-Mass disco-ball Sodom.

I wonder what my pre-Christian forebears from the isle might have venerated. Even as a kid, I rooted for Druids over Patrick, and felt bad about the copses felled where crosses rose. Evidence for sexual mores, naturally, remains notoriously difficult to interpret, given the lack of testimonies, the clerical censors, the surviving palimpsests of even medieval depositions and ancient lyrics confounding scholars. Compare with primordial scraps we rummage among, wondering what troglodytes did when they did what they did.

One archeologist compares what we know about pre-literate sexual activity to a few thousand bits of a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle. Timothy Taylor has mused, as I've addressed less imaginatively and more stolidly in my research (link may be down to pdf) on "the invention of 'Celtic Buddhism' as a concept," that the enigmatic find in Jutland of the Transylvanian-made Gundestrup Cauldron displays in its androgynous and shamanic figures an ambiguous glimpse at "tantric sex in Iron Age Denmark." (215) While as I have argued Taylor overstates his case, this giant decorated silver bowl represents for him a possibility that might have been. (Qualifications weigh down any sentence I can compose about this topic.) If Tantric yogic traditions could have spread from India to the West, by way of intersexed, torqued figures as the wisdom carriers of knowledge and dream, what a world might have evolved.

Taylor briefly entertains an alternative history: "the courts of medieval Europe might have thrilled to the erotic dances of Indian-style courtesans, surrounded by voluptuous sexual imagery, as on the Hindu temples of the Deccan." (218) This passage appears in his "The Prehistory of Sex" (1996). It  attempts to make sense out of such fragmented evidence from "four million years of human sexual culture." I found it (inevitably?) patchy and erratic, as the curious glimpses into shadowed contexts shifted so often and the focus, given the scattered fragments of evidence, endures as it always will, mysteriously suggestive, but his section on Neolithic megaliths captured my attention.

I once glimpsed Marija Gimbutas, the late Lithuanian-born archeologist, as I passed her open office door, deep in a green-painted, subterranean passage in a UCLA science building. This setting, cold and austere, may have suited her, for her studies during the decade I walked by her lab, praised by feminists, inspired notions of a goddess culture, a matriarchical hegemony that once stretched across pre-Iron Age Eurasia. Inevitably, her claims have been contested, and Taylor stands on firmer ground in suspecting her "Great Mother" vision reconstructed from figurines and postholes as too ameliorative, given the endemic legacy of war and greed that makes us forget that "hand tools" were most likely weapons first. Violence within our genes, for him, turns idylls suspect. I think of the scene opening "2001" in reverse. Yet, I also think of the travel narrative I re-started last night, after finishing it twenty years ago, Andrew Harvey's "A Journey in Ladakh." He entered in the 1970s that enclave, nearly free then of strife in a contentedly Buddhist fastness, a last redoubt already eroding by Kashmiri and Hindi frontier battles.

Taylor admits that hunter-gatherers cooperated, and that farming communities competed. Land ownership demanded paternity must be established, inheritance sorted out, and women, ground down by a sedentary existence, had to give up some relative freedom once they settled down. Down meant into a posture bent over, grinding grain, where babies had to be weaned earlier, so as to allow mothers a stance to keep toiling. Slings for babies out of sinews or fiber may have been the first tool invented, millions of years ago. Gathering women can walk with a baby (not with babies) and live among nomadic hunters.

But, when they farm, men and women must stay, and their babies that used to be spaced out in succession by longer breastfeeding and contraceptive knowledge gleaned from wild plants therefore get taken off the teat quicker. Mom's got to get back to work. Her infants are fed gruel from grown grain cooked in newfangled pottery. Mothers then get pregnant again more quickly and more often. Their bones wear out quicker, they may die off faster, and polygamy may turn status symbol. Maternal and infant mortality increase with more births: I recall that the odds were, until industrial time in the West,  1:10 that a mother would die in childbirth.

As sharper weapons hastened bloodier battle over newly stored wealth, violence meant that more men died, too, outpacing female mortality. Taylor estimates that even in the settlements praised by Gimbutas in present-day Turkey, males met a sudden end more often. More "surplus" women may have led-- this is me now ruminating-- to the "Solomon's 300 wives and thousand concubines" exaggeration of a cultural disparity that endures in the Arab and Muslim realms Haddad seeks to reform by pulp and photos and poets for promotion today. Starting in her native Middle East, as grain grows and animals breed in captivity, calorically-boosted, well-fed populations increase, land gets devoured, fences loom, plows harden, and spears bristle. Forested frontiers recede as farmers push out hunters and gatherers.

Taylor faces his own challenges to present his grimmer prehistorical perspective. He argues that settling down for the newly agricultural domesticators meant that they shifted their sexual understanding. He posits that "hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity," while its replacement "was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction. Afraid of the wild, farmers set out to destroy it." (142-3) One way they did this was, in post-Ice Age expansion, to insist on their dominance over their landscapes. Rather than fitting in and wandering about, settlers set boundaries. The Hebrews obsessed over separation of categories, clean and unclean, meat and milk, chosen and gentile, sinner and saved. Taylor figures that such peoples feared cross-dressers, homosexuals, and any who deviated from reproductive duties.

Those passages about leprosy and casting out the scarred and lame from Leviticus stun many students. A dim recollection that "ivrit" for the first Hebrew tribe meant  "boundary crosser" came to mind just now. Within a land they defended, such a people might be sensitive to defining what became justified as divinely granted patrimony with a vehemence and a vengeance against interlopers, transgressors, and those who resisted their commands. Taylor reasons that Middle Eastern farmers responded to control dangerous sexual impulses by watching the cattle they lived among, modelling their own treatment of women after the rutting bull's rapid function lorded over "relatively passive females."

His next chapter, halfway into his book, begins: "I do not believe a women built Stonehenge." One may have been sacrificed in its ditches, however. "I believe that the making of Stonehenge was ordered by a man and that he was unhappy." (167) Its alignment to invite the midsummer's sun's penetration with a shaft of light stays potent. But for Taylor, it's too boastful, betraying a recumbent earth-goddess resigned to her fate within a society which fears its untamed surroundings. He cites Peter Ellis's 1994 conception of the New Stone Age's psychological profile as a "collectively held obsession" erecting "a landscape of detached sexual objects." (qtd. 189)

Taylor considers how weaning infants earlier, in a warrior culture, may trigger what in Martin Seligman's theory's called "learned helplessness." Cry all you want, you won't get the bottle. In a society where the mother's withdrawn the nipple, energy's costly, the "weans" get ignored, and the wee'uns capitulate, instinctively following the natural rule that yelling out exposes a bird or beast to danger. But before the baby cries itself to sleep, it feels detached from reality, and cannot figure out how to regain power. The only way? Control one's surroundings. Rigid routines help this culture (and perhaps that of we, their genetic inheritors) regain a predictable way to "compensate for their primal distrust of the world." (191)

If the sun can be compelled to slip in just-so same time same place next year, there might be hope for those who try to conquer nature. Only the stones remain, with a few scratches of primal engorgement, primitive erections (one from Bronze Age Finland Taylor captions-- the figure looks like he wears a baseball cap as he pumps his free arm in the air in enthusiasm or frustration, I add-- as "skier attempting intercourse with moose") and primordial lumps carved into bosomy, considerably callipgyian globs which make Oprah not of Lebanon look like Lindsay Lohan.

Taylor examines more monumental configurations, passage-tombs arrayed like vast granite wombs to overcome death's dark tyranny by inviting the release of injected light, or what my demure consort has labeled in relation to the Tibetan yab-yum depiction of male-female energies (euphemism or profundity) "another big-dick thing." Standing pillars as massive maximizers hoisted to the bearded sky gods of the incoming Iron Age, memorialize as physical graffiti what we many boast (males at least, and at least the randier matriarchs of today's females I imagine given the phallic plethora of what scholars of the Upper Paleolithic gingerly label as "spear-straighteners") still: size matters, quantity over quality.

Surplus labor indeed, long before Marx, who with Engels knew far less about early civilization's family, state, and society. Subsequent radical thinkers strive to fit their theories into bold suppositions. Julian Cope, who symbolizes for me the root of the border-crossing heathen, the gnomic, genial, genuine oracle of chant and ritual and wonder and fear from the heath, the outlier, the pagani left behind by the populi who bow to emperor and then Rome, compiled two monumental edifices of his own complex odyssey.

First he went across Britain, to photograph, contemplate, and puzzle over more than 300 prehistoric sites in "The Modern Antiquarian" (1997). Then, in a book I just tracked down (neither has appeared in the U.S., nor have his excellent earlier memoirs of his post-punk personal odyssey through hell and back, "Head On" and "Repossessed"), "The Megalithic European," he expands to Ireland and the Continent. By now, thousands of miles Cope's searched another 300-plus of these oldest of remaining markers left to attest to a newly aware humanity's permanence, "defiant acts against the transitory nature of life."

Cope does not cite Taylor, so I'm left wondering how he'd respond to his Neolithic critique. But, as a self-taught interpreter of megalithic culture, who insists that he will not write about where he has not been, Cope's imaginative powers circle into the venerable echoes of these mysterious traditions. On his gothic-folk, ambient-meets-krautrock, Mellotron-metal recordings, he seeks to recover distant voices. He channels what for the stodgy professor may alienate as much as the typical rock listener, but for me, even if I prefer his books to some of his sounds these past couple decades (I favor his pioneering post-punk propulsion), he represents for me an admirable model of inspired reinvention and daring restoration.

His later book's a bit calmer in its approach, as he shares his acceptance of what some early-Celtic Christians tried to do to keep some pagan customs before Rome and the Synod of Whitby shut down resistance to Celtic practices. For instance, these fringe dwellers, against the Saxon incursion, kept Passover's lunar date for commemorating Easter; pro-Roman clerics dispatched soon cracked down on the restive Celts. The reformers of the papal mission to keep Britain tidy demanded an end to observing the central but now movable Christian feast same as the Jewish spring barley harvest.

(As an aside, Exodus appears to scholars if not congregants or celebrants today as a vastly exaggerated account, a post-dated rationale. Although you'd be hard-pressed to discern Pesach's Canaanite "origins" as I looked up now if the festival originated for barley or wheat-- I get Shavout and Pesach jumbled with which grain commemorates which. Shavuot-turned-Pentecost marks the pilgrimage fifty days later at the end of the wheat gathering. By the way, if you opt as I did experimentally for Bing to fact-check, you get About.com first, which led me to "Ask the Rabbi" about Ur and Terah. Wikipedia's Canaan-rein as Liebensraum for echt ur-Zionists uber alles in its origin myth as "Origins of Pesach" coverage, I note "hoeuretically" in the spirit of Cope v.i. [=vide infra, "see below."])

My linguistic, spring-fed friskiness prefaces Cope's discussion of similarly Easter-bunnied, seder-egg plated, lamb-shanked feasts of fertility. Almost randomly, "Megalithic" in a sample passage reveals Cope's scope. He doesn't deign to guess unless he signals such, but his introduction does remind us of how as nomads drifted into farming, their fixed views turned into compelling reasons for them to stay. He glances at how Jerusalem's Holy Land, the rock of Golgotha, the Temple Mount, the shrines at Mecca literally stand for "inward-looking world centres" that may faith-fully settle a religion into its sturdy roots. This foundation may also be viewed fatally: contrast the Chinese destruction of Tibet's culture by the simple means of obliterating its shrines and overcrowding their land with foreigners bent on atheism.

Home bases mean enclosure of animals, crops, and ourselves. Control brings a heightened sensitivity, and a mythologized response, to one's territory. Terra turns turf, as it were.

Cope reflects how this vantage point might have taken on the weight that (as contemplates Taylor v.s., "vide supra, see above"), our ancestors imposed upon its trees (hewn down as was Queen Maacha's grove), vegetables (as dust no less than Queen Macha's bones under her grave mound), or as stones, all from this period two, three, four or even five thousand years ago that can be somewhat still seen today.

Generations may come and go, but the great oak or yew on the edge of the grove remains the same. Mother's back grows crooked and bent, but the valley where the sun rises at the hottest time of the year shows no sign of change whatsoever. In a physical world awash with new significance, the new settlers will return again and again to marvel at the permanence of landscape features that they may have seen only fleetingly during nomadic times.(24)

The rock, Cope suggests, where children played twenty years on may be pointed out to their children. One may have once fallen asleep, dreamed on that sunny rock, and told friends of what was vividly dreamt. This story may be related to one's own children. They may play on "parent's rock" and what was dream may in time turn ritual. Others may try to fall asleep on the rock, to dream dreams, and some eventually will recount a dream worth recounting to others in the settlement. So the practice begins, of the dreaming-rock, and this may be conjured by the community as "the stone that speaks."

I think of the Kaaba-- a enormous arena surrounding the cube embedding a now-half invisible, ancient, fabled, space-dropped junk-chunk draped in enormous gold black silk-- as a metaphor for what Cope seeks to unveil. Behind the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies, the curtain beckons to us as we who are not worthy line up to pay the unseen its due homage. Haddad no more than heathen me will never touch such a protected, venerated yet monitored monolith as that dominating her Levantine world and the wide tropical belt that cinctures more than a billion who, as Roy studies, spread their faith and mores across a globe where people never heard of the Qur'an until perhaps the Net, the news, their new neighbors.

The transmission of old stories and "just-so myths" gravitates for over 1500 years around a meteorite landed in Mecca. The respect paid by those coming from all over the globe on the "haj" to the Black Stone set in a suggestively recessed concavity in the side of the Kaaba's cube--a building attributed by the Qur'an to Abraham and Ishmael's efforts--we are told, does not constitute idolatry. Pilgrims also stone the devil at the pillars of Mina nearby. For once, the site was filled with competition.

Back when this shrine to Allah housed hundreds of gods and goddesses, "al-lat" was a term for a female deity as was "al-lah" for a male god, among hundreds before Islam. Remember how "elohim" created the heaven and the earth in the first lines of Genesis: the concept of many gods predates even in scripture the rule by the One before whom no others dare cut in line. Mecca for Mother-goddess worshipping Muhammed's clan, Koraites, these "Koeur-ites" assembled amid the houris, the "Houer-ees" of the doe-dark eyes who survive, perpetuated as 72 recurring maidens promised a Muslim male in the firmament.

This babble will become slighter clearer now. Concerning etymology and sexuality, chapter five in Cope's "Modern" compiles "The Book of Ur." Not Abraham's Ur of the Chaldees birthplace-- although the midrash of 1) how honest lil' Abe predicted his patriarchical covenant by despoiling dad Terah's shelf of the idols he sold at this crossroads down the road from the fallen Tower of Babel, and 2) this rabbi's expounding of how the Hebrew Ur=fire via G-d's predictably cranky, infernal payback bolsters Cope's thesis-- but in this "etymosophy," a list of words related to ancient goddess-wisdom. Cope offers three packed pages of miniscule if well-arranged (his books are easy to consult and fun to view) definitions.

Ur leads us to Eriu, Erin, and Erse-- alongside Eros-- as wordy relatives nearest my home-turf. Koeur, Hoeur, Bree, and Ma may be discerned even by the Lindsey Lohans and Oprah-fans of today as nestled into terms such as "core, corpse, corn, kernel, chord", as "her, whore, house, heretic, haughty, hurricane," as "Bridget, pregnant, pretty, pray, braid," and as "matrimony, marry, mate, Amazon, and Macha"--whom he links between the "pre-Keltic" formidable queen of Emain Macha in Ulster with a grove-spirit burnt by the River Kidron by her son King Asa in 1 Kings 15:13. That shows the scope of this elucidation.

While some of this may be suspect, and some lacks sources, this sort of cross-cultural, multi-lingual, ecumenical mindset inspires me. Taylor and other scholars concur that Cernunnos, the Celtic horned-god, may be the figure on the Gundestrup Cauldron that my own articles have examined. Cope reminds me that this god's title too comes down from "Coeur." He also notes how this horned god morphed, under Christians, into their depiction of the devil. Christians at this same time feared their rivals, the Jews, as Passover had to be wrenched apart from Easter, the Celts apart from their constructions of another form of Catholicity. And, the same Church feared the Jews and mocked Moses by a mistranslation of that pesky vowel-parsimonous Hebrew. St. Jerome attributed not "rays of light" post-Sinai, as celebrated at Shavuot fifty days after the Exodus-feast of deliverance as the giving of the Torah to Moses, but the "horns"--which then grew into those, by medieval antisemitic calumny, of the devil.

Salman Rushdie (in)famously wrote of similarly marginalized stories, dangerous tales relegated as heresy, and misattributions by those frantic that a Mother-goddess might endure her overthrow by the monotheist prophets and priests. "The Satanic Verses" considers this alternative history of feminist and devilish influences upon Muhammed's message and its promotion. Unlike Gimbutas, Taylor, or Cope, Rushdie's "what-if" assumptions even disguised as fiction and not possible fact met with those as eager to destroy him as prelate, rabbi, and imam have condemned their pagan, gentile, infidel dissenters.

I started today with a reflection on a forbidden zone. I end up at the same place. That which we bow to, circle as sacred, lift up as hallowed separates us from those who despise, envy, or admire us. This may be natural to our humanity, the side that outside of a redoubt in the Himalayas we all find ourselves clinging to out of fear as the ghosts rally, the famine deepens, the foes march, and the fires flare. Sacred calves at Sinai, neo-pagans at Stonehenge, reviewers as on this blog of "The Satanic Verses": I stepped aside from critical hosannas for a tale I found ramshackle, too flimsy to tower as a literary monument.

The latest in a series of sexual and ideological rebels, as with her fellow border-crosser Rushdie, Joumana Haddad might roam into where words come from, and how they form our ideas. She might, in her forthcoming book, for all I know find feminist fodder in attributions to Muhammed's own tribe, named after a Koeur-goddess, and a Hoeur-temple. Preserved as "haram" the Kaaba lurks under a big black veil ever since the Prophet's inventions, projections, and revampings. Twice today, once by chance I can't recall where, then eerily by Georges Perec as quoted in a cameo in Harvey's Ladakh, the same E.M. Cioran quote:

In every moment there is a prophet asleep...and when that prophet awakes there's a little more evil in the world.

Women still stand apart, at Mecca and throughout temples and sanctuaries the world over. They don scarves, they cover their knees and elbows, they submit as Paul and haredi and the ummah expect. These women may welcome their hijab, their mehitzah, their cloister, their blinders from my male gaze.

Haddad refuses what many men claim that which other women claim they want. As an infidel, a suspect, a lapsed onlooker, I will forever lack full insight. I've been born into a category; its boundaries set me apart. My mind may strive to understand. My maleness keeps me ignorant. Names can never hurt me?

Photo: Taylor (198-99) interprets this Letnitsa 4c BCE silver-gilt bridle from today's Bulgaria imaginatively. I figured it fit today's April (Cope links this word to Bree) Fool's atmosphere of topsy as turvy. Taylor conjectures that this dramatizes not a "'hierogamy' as sacred marriage" but a seduction of a woman who plies a man with drink from the vessel held by her accomplice. The dominant female straddles the man, compliant as he sits and she squats. The attendant holds a leafy branch over the face of the woman on top, so the man cannot see who she is. It may be simply love is blind, but Taylor suspects mischief's Amazonially afoot. Barefoot, or underfoot, Amazons were fabled by Herodotus to lurk up from Danubia along the Don (both keep the name of one of the most ancient of female goddesses) river, east of Scythia in Sauromatia.  ("Mas"= an Indo-European root word for softness and fleshiness as in the Irish word for "thigh"-- a+mazos= without a breast in ancient Greek.)

(Portions of this will appear soon tidied, trimmed, and tamed into censored, if perky book reviews for Taylor and Cope on Amazon US.)

Ag éisteacht go Raidió Bhlag Cainte leis Seán na Cliste

Dúirt mé faoi stair phoblactach agus mná go hairithe dó faoi deireanach. Tá agallamh ag craoladh le Raidió Bhlag Cainte leis craolfar trí roinnt go dtí seo sa Mhárta seo. Tá uair chéad orm go raibh ag rá ar an raidió ann, ar ndóigh.  

Bheul, ní raibh maith liom ag cloisteáil mo ghuth ag béiceach ann. Smaonaigh mé go raibh os ro-h-ardú chomh ag taifeadh mar ráite is ard. Áfach, bhí maith go díreach liom an seans ag caint leis Seán na Cliste, óstach carthanach, agus a h-éisteoirí cliste go leor amach ansin. 

Tú ábalta ag éisteacht go an clár anseo de 14ú Márta faoi bún-stair phoblactach (23:48-31:10). Tá roinnt de réir araon Maud Gonne agus Countess de Markievicz de 15ú Márta ansin (33:20-38:50). Leanaim ag caint fúthu de 21ú Márta ansiúd (28:30-39:50). B’fhéidir, cruinneoidh an clár go fógraí faoi abhar mar gheall ar mná phoblachtachaí eile agus feimineachas ar an saol Angla-Éireannach agus Caitliceach. Cluinfear an chuid eile lá is faide anonn. 

An chuid is fearr den scéal go mbeidh ag cluinfear mo chairde dhil Antoine agus Ciara Mac an tSaoi ag cheile. Is iriseoirí siad ag gcónaí in Eireann. Scríobhann beirt faoi poblachtas go minic. 

Go cinnte, níl fhíos agam chomh ná foghlaim siad! Dá bhrí sin, éist go Raidió Bhlag Cainte anois. Foghlameoidh tú níos mo rudaí Éireannach ag inste le na saoithe-- an dís ag cur tuarisc ar hÉireann acusan féin. 

Listening to Blog Talk Radio with John Smart. 

I spoke about republican history and women especially in it recently. It was an interview broadcast by Blog Talk Radio with three parts so far aired in this past March. It was the first time for me that I was talking on the radio, of course. 

Well, I didn’t like hearing my braying voice there. I thought it was too loud as taped as I spoke far too strongly. However, I was quite happy for a chance to speak with kind host John Smart  and his many smart listeners out there. 

You’re able to listen to the program here from March 14^th about basic republican history (23:48-31:10). The part concerning both Maud Gonne and the Countess de Markievicz from March 15^th there (33:50-38:50). I follow speaking about them on March 21^st over there  (28:30-39:50). Perhaps, the program may announce my material with regard to other republican women and feminism in Anglo-Irish and Catholic life. Somebody may hear the rest at a future date. 

The best part of the story’s that somebody will hear my dear friends Anthony and Carrie McIntyre together. They’re journalists living in Ireland. The pair write often about republicanism. 

Surely I know less than they know! Therefore, listen to Blog Talk Radio now. You will learn more about Ireland told by the experts-- a pair reporting from Ireland themselves.

(Countess de Markievicz:  grianghraf/photo le/by B. Keogh. )

Christmas Humphreys' "Sixty Years of Buddhism in England": Book Review

Six decades spans the coming of Buddhism as a novelty to the island into its hesitant acceptance, during the countercultural efflorescence, as a hip commodity. He compiles the movement's history, as unflagging co-founder of the Buddhist Society in 1924 that overlapped an earlier one founded in 1907.

He follows the Society's fortunes briskly, in a rapid survey of its challenges during both wars, and especially what faced its members when WWII London engulfed, literally, its situation. The men had to choose to serve or not, and Humphreys tells fairly of their decisions, and of the bravery that those in the City had to find within themselves as their Headquarters faced the flames. He learns the lesson of impermanence, to be sure.

Humphreys also shows characteristic wit. He finds at Westminster Cathedral circa 1928 a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet by one G. Willoughby-Meade, "Buddhism in Europe." It opens with a tirade against "a much more insidious foe" than even Spiritualism. Humphreys notes how: "The whole pamphlet is a fine example of the psuedo tolerance of Rome, which advises a careful examination of all other points of view on the unshakable assumption that they are all wrong." (31-2) Its condescending tone towards Buddhist adherents as "little children stumbling in the dark" will not be the last manifestation of the kind of intolerance that Humphreys and his cohorts will face in Britain.

Still, they soldier on as peaceful warriors. He promotes dharma as a harmony of religion (of a non-theistic sense) and science, a rational philosophy rather than dogmatic authority, and one offered "with humility and tolerance, yet as provably true, as tested by thousands of years of experience." (75) He strives to make it understandable for Westerners. Some later have criticized his approach as too humanist, too soft, but for his era, before the widespread transmission of Tibetan and Zen techniques over much of the West, he sought to dispel misunderstandings of a incense-wafting, nihilistic, idol-worshipping, Void-obsessed cult that repelled timid pallid inquirers.

In this, published in 1968, we find an concluding appeal for a more lasting Buddhism than a fad for instant enlightenment by chemicals or charlatans. He advises, against the fervor of that time, for a Buddhist institution to eschew "politics of any kind," but he also encourages each Buddhist to exemplify its deathless precepts in a disciplined, committed fashion. By this, he reckons, more by example than "by useless and generally harmful interference" can be done.

Arguable, but from one who lived through two World Wars and defended and prosecuted many at the Bar, he shows here as in his autobiography (1978's "Both Sides of the Circle"--also reviewed by me) a mature defense of one who sought to go beyond the introverted stance of many of his fellow British Buddhists and who took on moral causes as his own dogged radical in conformist's clothing. He and his colleagues as summarized in this report tried to put down roots within, rather than lay them across, the Western soil where they transplanted Buddha's message "against the darkness now descending on the spiritual world." (84)

Illustration: "Buddhism in England" 5:2 (June 1930) Published by the "Buddhist Lodge" in London, as an early effort of Humphreys and cohort to bring such experts as D.T. Suzuki-- via a publication later under the editorship or Alan Watts-- to the attention of Western audiences. (Posted to Amazon US 4-18-10)

Christmas Humphreys' "Both Sides of the Circle": Book Review

Famed London barrister and Buddhist popularizer, his 1978 autobiography reads as quaintly as his Edwardian verse that he preferred and imitated. Perhaps more of a curio than a solid look at what made him so determinedly countercultural well before the hippie era, nonetheless I found it instructive in an appealing musty, eccentric, and burnished manner. As you might expect given his first name, he unfolds his story erratically but in a rather calculated way to express himself as a clearly inspired sort of "character."

Certainly his life, spanning the century, epitomizes a kind of restless upbringing that marked many of his generation. Born in 1901, his brother's death in the Great War marked him early to turn from verities to searching, and soon he found Theosophy. Curiously, he never abandoned its tenets even as he soon practiced Buddhism, and this makes for an odd pair, for as an articulate, passionate humanist, his hankering for the transports of Blavatsky and her circle appears to be at cross purposes with dharma as Humphreys expounds it. Yet, after the trauma of WWI as he witnessed it as a student at a distance, he sought when up at Cambridge (just missing the war due to his age), solace for his nagging "What's it all 'about'?"

He soon became by the mid-1920s a spokesman for Buddhism. The sense of "unborn, unoriginated, unformed" fascinated him, along with its sense of justice along a "Middle Way." With his wife, he tirelessly devoted his time to the Buddhist Society as a co-founder (see my review of his summation, "Sixty Years of Buddhism in Britain"), when not prosecuting and defending at the Bar. He tells of how he sought to be scrupulously fair to those he represented or challenged in court, and how their karma, and his, made him take very seriously his role as their advocate or adjudicator.

Given my interest in Irish republicanism, I would have liked more on the case tried by his father of one accused of arson: "Mason," the "C.O. of the I.R.A. in Great Britain," but understandably he gives more time to his role in the postwar Japanese war crime trials, that of spy Klaus Fuchs, Ruth Ellis who killed her lover, and other spectacular cases for his British readership. He tells skillfully of his role as "Senior Prosecuting Counsel" and how he took his appointment, handling murder cases often as not, with the utmost sense of compassion mixed with justice. His words on "crimes of passion" merit meditation by many bent on "lock 'em up and throw away the key" today. "I repeat, there are worse crimes than the majority of the murders which for many years I put before a jury for trial." (170)

He journeyed to Asia, and offers a fine account of meeting D.T. Suzuki the Zen scholar. Humphreys asks him: "You mean that all is God but there is no God?" Suzuki responds: "I mean that all is God and there is no God." After that exchange, Humphreys "took a long step forward on my way to Zen." (129) He relates how the Buddha and oneself are not "'two' identical things but two 'identical' things." The difference is in the inflection.

He also sought to make Buddhism more relevant to the problems of the postwar world. He and his wife "Puck," of whom he writes touchingly, traveled widely to connect Western practitioners with Eastern experts at a time before the Tibetan diaspora spread teachings globally. Appended to his book's his "Twelve Principles of Buddhism," which he sought to promote as a sort of ecumenical common ground for all sects of the dharma. As an early confidant of the present and then young Dalai Lama, he assisted the first waves of refugees via the Tibet Society. He finds in 1956 the Dalai Lama's speech to a conference about a prophecy than spoken of in Tibet would come true soon: "that in the course of time the Dharma would move from Tibet to the land of the 'pink skinned' people." (195)

Humphreys concludes his tale still involved in this work among the 'pink skinned" people himself, as one of the earliest expounders of Buddhism in Britain. He urges us to find the moral ambition and common wisdom within all religions, and not to ignore in teaching the young "the Light which gave them birth." (252) He ends by elucidating the title of his story: "every pair of opposites is more than the two sides of a coin. It is, and never ceases to be the One from which both came. This Oneness is the Centre which, 'abiding nowhere', is each point of the circumference. Here is mystery, in a world of intuitive awareness to which, one day, knowingly, we shall arrive, At least, as we grasp both sides of the circle we shall be moving towards its centre, the Self within, which will be found to be at the same time light and life and love." (256-7)

This passage transmits some of the tone of this book. It may be too ethereal for some, too sentimental for others. But within, you get the sense of a sincere man who devoted his long life to bettering the condition of others, in body and soul, incarcerated or on the outside, who sought to solve some of the mysteries of our freedom and what we do with such a human condition in a world full of pain. (Posted to Amazon US 4-18-10)