@ Sunday, Jun. 15, 2008 – 04:38:44 pm
All things must come to an end, and as many of you have perhaps surmised from the fewer and fewer posts, I've run out of inspiration for this blog for the moment. And there's nothing worse than an inspirationless blog.
Added to which, I'm back writing my novel after six months break ... everything goes into that.
So this is the end, my friends, the end, until I begin a new blog ... when I think of what it will be ... until then ... much love
Roger
@ Tuesday, May. 27, 2008 – 10:38:19 pm
‘Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is such a filthy place and I love it that way ... it's a wonderful, grand adventure. It's not a matter of whether I approve of the filth - I don't, and if I could have a clean, glistening perfect world, perhaps I would ... I don't know.
But things being the way they are, it's at the very least interesting ... it's great
I don’t mind the filth of advertising and the Hollywood pornography of violence in the films, computer games and on DVD’s; the filth of bad music and signs everywhere; the filth of clear-felled forests, genetically altered sheep and caged chickens; the filth of corporate greed and pollution; the filth of arguing, ineffectual politicians, of war and starvation when I have so much to eat; the filth of the so called drug war and prisons which only create more of what they profess to ameliorate. The filth of hypocritical moralizers and religious freaks trying to stamp their ruined, black and white world view over the gorgeous rainbow of life.
Like everybody else, I live in all this filth and I am, as each of us are, even responsible for some of it. It’s not a perfect world. It’s chaotic ... and, as I said, it's wonderful because it's chaotic.
I accept that.
And for that reason, I do not approve of censorship of any kind especially of the arts which, of all the 'filths' of the world, even at its most obnoxious and obscene, always massages the spirit.
But I understand that bucket-heads everywhere will take exception to what artists get up to, and start prattling about 'sending a messge' by trying to ban it and publically crucify the artist. A notable example if this was a photo called 'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano - it wasn't my cup of tea, but I loved the fact that it exists, my reasoning being, of all the 'filths' of the world, at least 'Piss Chirst' had a sense of humor.
But bucket-heads will keep on being bucket-heads, and recently they all put on their buckets and did it again ... out with their pursed lips, complaints, paranoid rationale and dirty minds, trying to ban another artist and his work.
It's a lethal cocktail of judgement, hysteria, fear and interference that is becoming much too common in the world ... and now it's happening here in Australia, yet again. IO had hoped we would have grown up a bit since 'Piss Christ' but we haven't.
And one of the most amazing things about all this is it's my generation - the baby boomers - who are behind it - we were the ones who experimented with everything from bad moustaches,'mutton-chops' and mescaline to free sex and nakedness, so one would have thought the massive amount of experimentation we indulged in throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's would have put paid to our silliness with regard to sex and nakedness now we're all grown up.
But no ... like reformed alcoholics, we've gone all self righteously prim in our old age and nakedness, making love and genitalia are back on the ban-agenda - signatures of evil, but with a new spin.
So what am I referring to. Well ... Bill Henson of course.
Coming out of the very serious revelations of child abuse and paedophilia that have been piling up recently, the latest triggerpoint for our ageing paranoia is this photo - CLICK HERE - and the artist who created it, Bill Henson.
Though the photo was made many years ago, it was recently a part of an exhibition, and used on the cover of a circular, which elicited complaints ... and yada yada yada, as they say.
Bill Henson's photographs have been a quiet, but extremely influential part of our public aesthetic for decades, and his photos and their subject matter have been well known for years, all over the world. Hes one of our greatest artists, yet now, because of the wording of a particular law, called 'The obscenity law', he’s being charged and hounded in the press, accused of creating pornographic images of naked 12 year old girls and boys for the purpose of exhibition. Not only him, but the galleries who exhibit his work are also being prosecuted, and the works in question impounded as evidence.
"It's filth!" they all cry. A newspapers spinning the issue out for everything it can make of it.
Now, bear in mind that the particular image in contention has been around for over a decade - in fact, the 13 year old girl in the photo is now a 30 year old mother who has said publicly that she had no problem with the sessions all those years ago - that Henson was wonderful to model for, and her mother sanctioned the shoot.
The public reaction has been shrill and hysterical, all to do with the notion that the images are pornographic because they portray naked adolescence - and that the subjects of the photos have been abused by being photographed naked.
Social workers are building horror stories of all the terrible possibilities - that these images could spread to the web where pedophiles sitting in the light of computer screens in darkened rooms will have their horrid ways (as if they’d bother, with the plethora of much more overt pornography spattered all over the web) - all in a sudden fit of protectiveness for the ‘victim’ - who as I said, has already stated that she has no problem with the images.
This furor is so hysterical it's become ridiculous, particularly considering the photos themselves. I mean, aside from obvious nakedness, whatever sexual connotations they may have are clothed and largely overpowered by more aesthetic qualities of mood, light and the magically infinite resonance of a perfectly suspended moment.
So what is it that deserves a charge of obscenity? The bare fact of adolescent nakedness?
Well then ... if that's the issue, why not get out the hammers and smash up Michelangelo’s ‘David’, slash Michelangelo de Caravaggio - ‘St. John with Ram’, a blatant testament of adolescent bestiality as ever I’ve seen - not to mention all the naked bare budded cupids that float all throughout the sentimental heavens of Rococo art?
And what about all the statues from Renaissance, Classic Greek, Roman, of pre-pubescent boys and girls - are we to secret them all away as well, lest some stray pedophile use them for a covert wank?
And what about all the dogs penises and cats bumholes all around the place ... they’re everywhere. Surely if we are to spirit away the photos of Bill Henson, we should also be running around putting underpants on dogs and cats. In fact, we should put underpants on the entire world. It's all filthy.
Yes I know I'm being ridiculous, but no more than the hysterical reactions to Henson's work.
All this silliness reminds me of a story in Zen Buddhism which goes like this:
‘An old monk and young monk, on approaching a flooded river saw a gorgeous woman in rich attire standing on the bank wondering how to cross to the other side.
Now, it is a strict rule of the Vinaya (code by which Buddhist monks live) that physical contact with a woman is forbidden for a monk. The young monk, mindful of this rule, ignored the woman and, walking right past her, waded across to the other side.
The old monk however, stopped and asked the woman if she'd like him to carry her across. She said she would appreciate the assistance, so he lifted her up and carried her across the water to the other side where she continued on her way.
The two monks continued their journey for some hours before the younger monk finally gave voice to what was concerning him greatly.
"We are monks," he said. "You know the rues .. we shouldn't be close to a woman, let along touch her. Yet you, a venerable old monk, in clear breach of the rules, touched a woman! Why did you do that?"
The older monk laughed."What woman?" he said. "I put her down hours ago. Why are you still holding her?"
So I suppose what this says is, the obscenity is not with the photos, or Bill Henson. It's in the minds of those who see it in these exquisite photos - the ones screaming and pointing their fingers.
I think, in this wonderfully toxic world, the one thing we have that protects us is choice.
We do not have to look, or participate, or be influenced by what we find objectionable ... if we don't want to.
We all have choice.
So ...if you don’t like Henson’s works, the answer is easy ... don’t look. If you see it on the internet, change the page.
"Ahh," comes the predictable cry. "But what about the kids who were the subjects of these obscene photos? And the manipulative predator with a camera who conned them into it ... did the kids have choice? After all, they have to live with these pictures of their nakedness blah blah blah ..."
Of course they had choice, as did their parents, who gave permission for these images to be shot.
Can't be bothered with this anymore .. it's too stupid for words.
CU later with other things ...
--------------------------------------------------------------
PS ... It's now a week later and finally we've have come to our senses --- with the rueful headline: 'Henson porn prosecution unlikely'.
@ Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2008 – 06:54:10 pm
A few years ago I played a game of monopoly with my sister and her family. It was as intense as some monopoly games can be. The whole game became about keeping Mayfair and Parklane separate so my nephew couldn’t begin building on them ... and the strategies went to and fro as properties changed hands and players went tearfully, resentfully bankrupt. Very stressful, with all the arguments and tears. As I said, it was intense.
Halfway through the game we took a break.
I walked out to the garden with a glass of wine to stand beside the pond they have out there and look up at ghostly clouds skidding overhead in the night sky, and inside the house I could hear a bitter argument over the loss of something ... and some kid’s victorious cackle of laughter at the gain of something else, together with my sister raising her voice trying to placate the emotional residue from the game.
The cloud I was watching became two clouds ... then reformed to become one again ... and the trees all whispered around me, their leaves swaying and rustling in the breeze .... and the dog that was asleep on the sun-lounge lifted its head as another dog barked far away ... and I realized that the world is so big, and unconcerned with things so small as the loss of Park Lane, or Mayfair ... right then in Somalia child soldiers were smoking dope and cleaning their guns ... in London smart young things were doing coke off the lids of toilets .... lovers were strolling hand in hand along the banks of the river Seine ... people everywhere on the planet were living, dying, working, sleeping, laughing, making love ... plotting scheming ... and all the while the clouds kept dividing and reforming, disappearing and appearing while the world spins silently through space ...
Standing there watching the clouds, the bizarreness of I'd been doing came over me ... that when I was playing this game of monopoly, nothing else had existed but that tiny little game. The game had formed its own tight horizon around me, encapsulating my life - and in that tiny little flurry of activity, for all of us grouped around the board, time sped up and blood ran hot - we argued and schemed and plotted and felt the disappointment of loss and the euphoria of victory. For those few hours there was nothing else ... no clouds, no pond ... no war in Iraq, no bombs in Israel ... no birds, reptiles, oceans or stars ... the rest of life had disappeared ... my entire perception of the world suddenly constricted to a square board littered with paper, cards, two dice and a whole lot of plastic houses and hotels.
As a faint Autumn breeze ruffled my hair, I took another sip of wine and felt quite silly because it had all seemed so important.
I wondered if this is what dying is like, if only for an instant, the sudden expansion of perspective, as the game fades away, we see the bigness of everything, and realize how much the tiny little game we had played for our three-score-years-and-ten had been the master of our life instead of ourself.
All the victories and losses, the all encompassing heat of it all.
How utterly engaging it is ...
... perhaps because its the only game in town ... life, that is.
After all, what the hell else is there for us to do with all this time and energy except play the game we’re born into?
@ Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 – 04:26:05 pm
A while ago a friend and I were talking about our parents - all the mistakes they made that continue to bug us even now. And how, of all the things that happen in the life of a human being, it is our parents mistakes that made the most indelible marks on our souls.
Inevitably the conversation turned to the notion of forgiveness.
Not whether to forgive our parents ... but how to forgive them, because to forgive is often difficult - particularly with parents.
I think this is because very often their transgressions and failings have created a subtle kind of childish rage within most of us, which is so close to our bones, and which we’ve lived with so long, that no matter how we want, we cannot let it go. It’s almost as if the rage has become a part of our self-definition and to let go of it would seem almost like a betrayal of everything we are.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was free from this kind of residual rage however veiled beneath filial regard it might be. And those who think they are free of it are often simply unaware of it - having lived with it for so long it has become a characteristic of their perception of mundane ‘normality’.
This rage often comes out as the childhood war stories that we entertain each other with - those stories of family lunacy which either make us squirm or scream with laughter - those moments that only children experience where they are profoundly at loss to explain why one or both parents are doing what they are doing. At its most extreme, a violent argument between mother and father, while relatively insignificant to adults, can seem to a child as if the entire universe is collapsing. Death, divorce, violence, or simply the lunatic idiosyncrasies of an average adult - before them a child feels small and utterly out of their depth, and they all leave a mark of some kind.
No childhood is ever free of the effects created by the madness of adults.
I’m not saying this is bad - but simply a fact of life. In fact, one could say it’s these stressors in childhood that create the emotional resilience we all need to cope with the life we enter as adults. After all, adult life can seem like we’re a kid stuck in the middle of a bad marriage sometimes - when we feel so very small in the middle of universal forces in collision, and it’s all we can do to hang on until we understand.
I think even those parents who try to to be perfect will inevitably stuff it up as far as a child is concerned.
I remember when I was a counsellor, I had a bloke come in who, in one stunning declaration expressed utter hatred for their father while at the same time extolling what a wonderful parent he had been. Somewhat perplexed, I asked, “So ... if your father was so loving, generous and easy going, why do you feel so bitter?”
The answer came back: “No boundaries!! He let me do whatever I liked!! He never criticized me ... so how the hell was I supposed to grow! And what makes it worse is I have no excuse to complain because he was such a perfect father. All my friends loved him!!!”
‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘what a bastard.’
Many children might have flourished with the unconditional love and trust of a father like that, yet here was this guy utterly fixated with his own unique spin, which came out for him a how his father had disempowered him with love. He interpreted his father’s liberal approach as indifference ... and chose to hate him for it.
And me?
Well, I hated my father all the way through the first thirty years of my life - loathed him utterly until at the age of thirty, sitting on the huge pile of my own mistakes, I realized I was just like him - a foolish and very flawed man trying to do the best with what I had.
I realized then that my hatred largely arose from disappointment, because my father had not fitted the template in my head of how the perfect father should be. So now I have accepted him ... the man - a terribly flawed, foolish and unique human being ... just like me.
In that I suppose the light of my own folly shines very kindly on him.
But even so, no matter how much I have understood the man he is, and no matter how intensely I could love him, I don’t think I can ever totally expunge the rage at what happened in my childhood - not because my father was bad man but because my own feelings of outrage run so deep within me they seem somehow untouchable, permanently burning, like the molten core of the earth. And even though I have reached an intellectual reconciliation, there always seems to be a more visceral part of me that is profoundly inconsolable.
It’s very strange to have a head that is entirely cool with the events of my childhood and has let it go, and a body that still is utterly unforgiving in relation to its history.
So then, as I said at the beginning, this friend and I were talking about forgiveness.
His own parents had been a nightmare - narcissistic, violent and judgmental. His childhood war stories were a litany of often bizarre public spectacles between his parents that all children abhor. He’d been beaten in anger, abandoned, told he was no good, and so on. If anyone had cause to hate his parents, it was him.
So there we were, swapping war stories, laughing ourselves sick at how horrifying it had all been, when he stopped and said, “but seriously, how do you free yourself of this darkness?”
I thought about this for a second or two.
“I don’t think you do.” I said. “You just learn to live with it I suppose. You forgive them.”
“Forgive them?” He guffawed. “Not a fucking chance!” he declared.
But still, the notion took our attention. In further discussion we decided that the only way we could forgive was to look further on down the line than the relationship between us and them - to taste a little of what our parents had experienced at the hands of their own parents - and their parents before them. Only then could we see that our parents had been as much victims as we apparently were.
At which point our exclusive claim to victim-hood might disappear, simply because we see that the perpetrators of our own suffering were themselves victims. And not only that, but it might also be seen that the thousand year battlefield of ‘children-becoming -parents-of-children-becoming-parents’ is littered with the best of intentions, most of which failed, simply because all humans are so terribly flawed.
All down the line from the first to the latest, I think most parents try their hardest to do the very best that they can .... and really, isn't that enough? To know that?
But it was at this point in our discussion that we came into difficulty, because we realized that, okay ... we accept that our parents tried hard ... but if we are to forgive our parents in this manner, by understanding them as they were made, then we must by logical extension, forgive everybody!
... (unless of course, you believe in the notion of innate evil, which I definitely don’t)...
We must forgive all the monsters of history ... the onmes we love to hate ... the mad sadistic emperors, the deluded dictators, monsters, serial killers, rapists, paedophiles ... all of them were once victims - before they became perpetrators, the all suffered at the hands of some other victim, playing out their rage.
All monsters were children once - innocent, their characters formed by their parents and their environment. Just as I am who I am because I was made this way, all of us are products of who and what came before.
Take Hitler for instance. Alice Miller Phd, in an article titled ‘The Nature of Abuse’, puts it well when she says:
“ ... the monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster. He was not sent to earth by the devil, as some people think, nor was he sent by heaven to "bring order" to Germany, to give the country the autobahn and rescue it from its economic crisis, as many others still believe.
Neither was he born with "destructive drives", because there are no such things. Our biological mission is to preserve life, not to destroy It. Human destructiveness is never inborn, and inherited traits are neither good nor evil. How they develop depends on one’s character, which is formed In the course of one's life, and the nature of which depends, in turn, on the experiences one has, above all, in childhood and adolescence, and on the decisions one makes as an adult.
Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a monster. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called "child-rearing" and that I call "the concealed concentration camp of childhood," which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.. A terrible childhood, abusive father, violence and so on. An enraged little child beat at the walls of his heart and he did terrible things, along with all his enraged mates. And millions of people died in horrible ways ...”
So then, could Hitler have been a monster and innocent all at the same time?
Can such a thing exist?
I think it does ... and I'm aware that a huge number of people would vehemently disagree with me. The notion of innate evil is, after all, a moral premise of our time - (I would say, among the most damaging, but that's another post).
And just as this paradox of opposite values describes Hitler, so too I think it also applies to us all. We are all within ourselves, the villains and victims at the same time ... so, as Jesus is reputed to have once said, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone ...”
So then, back to our parents ... and forgiveness? How do we do it?
After all, there is no denying that many of the things parents have done to children have been dreadful. Open any tabloid and the sins of parents are daily grist for the mill of public outrage.
We ( mew and my friend) came to a conclusion that the only way we can forgive is to make it an act of unconditional love rather than a judgement.
By this I mean, in forgiving we are not in any way validating what was done - nor are we discounting the terrible effect it might have had on us.
All we are doing is acknowledging the innate fallibility of any being, and in acknowledging the fallibility of others, we are also then able to grant it to ourselves.
Because there is a terrible burden that comes with judgment - the possibility that in different circumstances, we ourselves might well become whoever we judge.
As Nietzche wrote:
‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
@ Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008 – 08:04:34 pm
As I said in a previous post, I recently lost someone close to me. I had thought to keep it to myself, but since then has been so interesting I think I'll come clean and talk about it, perhaps because someone else out there might have had similar experiences.
So here it is. Five weeks ago my son Rafik died from an aneurysm - a vein ruptured in his brain.
It was a terrible shock.
And all the clichés come to mind - how he was just finding happiness and peace for the first time in his life - about how he was finally getting on top of the long lived problems he'd had - how he was loved because he'd made himself into such a good man - about how he'll be missed. All those clichés that one hears on the television when someone dies, and arrogantly thinks , 'couldn't they have come up with something more original than that?' But then it happens to me and I find myself uttering those same clichés - simply because they're so damned true.
And then there's all the other clichés, from people all around: 'I'm sorry for your loss', and the like. When heard from a distance, they sound so trite - and yet how meaningful they become when one's own heart is bursting with loss. And you are so appreciative of the heart that those words came from, that felt so deeply it has to be carefully controlled, and packaged in the safe haven of a cliche, for the benefit of you both - to honour the fact that they cannot possibly know what you're feeling; and to keep from breaking down because so much has yet to be done and tears are not useful now. Until Rafik died I never realized all this - the beauty and care of those carefully given clichés.
Superficially, I have no problem with death - no illusions or fears. Death doesn't spook me, nor does it particularly worry me, and I'm not particularly fussed about my own oncoming death, whenever it happens.
I've been close to death a few times - those times most people experience in the course of a life, when death flitted past just a millimetre away - when if I had have been a second earlier, or later - or taken a left turn instead of a right, I would have been dead in a flash.
In those times, as I listened to the imperceptible shuffle of death’s slippered feet fading away, while giggling insanely from the adrenalin rush of my escape, I've always been amazed by how profound the effect was of that proximity to my own death. Nothing brings such unspeakable clarity to the inexpressible exquisiteness of life as a brush with death. As Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully".
As one who has always been curious about death, I had the opportunity a number of years ago, of watching an autopsy (research for a book). A friend who was an ambulance officer at the time dressed me up in one of his old uniforms and signed me in as a trainee. It was fascinating. I saw a large man about 30 years of age, lying on a gurney with his eyes open and I could swear he was still breathing. And even as he was slowly gutted and de-brained by a medical examiner, still I could swear he was breathing.
So when the examiner extracted his heart and took it away to a nearby bench to be dissected, as he lay there his abdomen splayed open, I went up and looked down into his eyes, and I could have sworn at the time they were looking right back into mine. I kept thinking any minute he would sit up on the gurney and say, 'Bloody hell, what's going on?' - that it was all a mistake.
These uncanny hallucinations, of him still breathing, of his eyes being about to blink, all indicated to me that my brain was having great difficulty making sense of the stillness of death - the incredible incomprehension of a lack of life.
What made this all the more odd was, when I’d been a kid living in the country death was everywhere - as most country kids can attest. I’d seen ailing sheep shot. I’d killed thousands of rabbits, some with a gun, others with my hands. And though sometimes I’d paused after breaking their necks and felt their hearts speed up with the last burst of life, falter and stop, still I'd not given it much of a thought - just slung them onto the wire with all the rest of the dead rabbits and walked on. But then, as I think about it, perhaps it had been that in my ignorant country-boy universe of the time, it simply seemed normal for animals to die, yet utterly unbelievable for humans.
So too is it still unbelievable - even now, five weeks away from Rafik’s death.
The strangest thing is, in my surface intellect I have rationalized that shocking event and packaged it neatly, ready to be stored away. When I look into my thoughts now there are no more tears or grief. And if someone were to ask how I feel about Rafik being gone, I’d be likely to say, ‘I think I’m cool with it now’. Because I think I am. I understand I’ll never see him again. The gone-ness of his going is fully comprehended now. Superficially, one could say I’ve let go and am ready to move on with the rest of my life
But wait. There’s another level to all this, but it’s not something I can express, or even understand with the mind I’m used to understanding things with.
It’s a body thing. It's like my whole body is thinking, and digesting this recent event at its own pace, quite apart from my mind/brain.
Like, it feels as if there's a deep, deep rumbling right down in the subterranean caves of my being - an immense back and forth tidal movement as if the entire inner core of my personal planet is still in turmoil as it tries to find equilibrium, while all is quiet on the surface.
And this inner dissonance has profound surface effects - I find myself feeling such ridiculous things - sudden and intense rage with no source or focus, sadness for no reason, exhaustion that comes down in an instant, inexpressible despair which, like mould in the tropics, appears from nowhere and covers everything.
So I meditate on it. I deep sea dive down into the sensations in my heart and in my body and, where usually I can manage to find the source and open it up - this strange ruction of my being appears to have no source. It’s almost cellular and as as such I cannot quantify it or even say for sure that it exists, except that I feel it.
This silent rumbling and clashing of rocks deep in my private universe - it’s so much a force of nature I am awed by its power, and by how little I am in control of it. I feel almost humbled by it ... and somewhat embarrassed, because I am reminded that when I was a counselor, I had a number of clients who came to me with similar reactions to the death of someone close, and though I suppose I might have asked the right questions, I know now I never really understood the depth of what they felt - and how confusing it must have been for them.
Because there is no explanation!
I feel such intense things, yet I cannot explain - and that’s what makes it so strange. The disconnect between the event of Rafik’s death, and what I feel is so incredibly profound that if I was of a panicky kind, I would think I was going mad - because there is no control of this force. There is not even a sense of being able to predict its patterns because it doesn’t appear to have any.
Another interesting thing is how isolated one feels - an intense loneliness that is not the fault of anyone, because it’s not about the lack of people. It's something else I can't get a grip on. Profound loneliness.
Very strange, because I’ve never felt lonely before. Not really. I’m not the lonely type. I never pine for people, because I”m very happy with my own company. But now I have these surprising moments when I pine for the company of others. Yet I cannot imagine who I’d want to see, or what I’d say to them if they were to come.
I think, ‘what do I want from all these people whose company I don’t usually need? Why do I pine for their company?’
I don’t know. And that’s terribly confusing on its own.
So ... there you go. This too will pass, but all the same, it’s very interesting while it's here.
Thanks for listening. It’s nice to talk ...
@ Tuesday, Jan. 08, 2008 – 01:03:35 am
Life doesn’t move in a straight line.
It progresses as a wave form, modulating between opposites around a middle way - or as the saying goes, ‘sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes sunny, sometimes rain.”
And just as life moves in a wave form, so too does everything IN a life.
As any athlete knows, there is a wave pattern to their training progress - not only in physical prowess, but also in their levels of aptitude and motivation. The first progress wave is slow, but steady. There is always a freshness of mind in beginning any enterprise, which gains momentum as confidence grows. Then comes the elation of continued progress, in which the athlete feels like a master of the universe.
Then, right at the peak of confidence and prowess comes the lapse - an apparent decline in ability, progress and motivation.
This is followed by shock at the decline, and (if there is no coach to enlighten them) failing confidence as the athlete becomes demoralized. Then, right at the point where things seem darkest, comes the beginning of the next wave up.
It’s the same in the share market - any trader knows that the market moves in waves - the wave up being made of three smaller progressions, then two progressions in the inevitable wave down. And that entire movement forms the progression a much larger wave, also of three up and two down, which is a progression in a larger wave and so on. Waves within waves.
Anyone who has read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ or any of the voluminous material available about Fibonacci numbers or the aesthetic notions of ‘The Golden Mean’ or ‘Golden Section’ would know that this wave movement of all things, and the proportions in which the waves move seems to be universal - roughly 1.6 to 1. Nobody seems to know exactly why the universe moves in this way, but everything in it seems to obey this ratio, from art to the flux between peace and war in the world arena.
The same movement can be seen in our own emotional phases and moods - and the way an emotion rises, plays out, then fades - beginning, consolidation, intensification, extinction burst, then dissipation.
From making love, to the ebb and flow of oceans, to the rise and fall of empires - everything moves in waves.
For myself, a perfect example of this wave pattern became apparent when I was a songwriter.
Though I didn’t know about wave theory at the time, I got to know that there were certain thresholds I had to pass through to craft a good song. It’d start of from a small core idea - a chord progression, riff or feel - or perhaps a key lyric of about one or two lines. Usually this first wave would come spontaneously with the intimation of a complete song already resonating within it - I’d almost be able to hear it just a few steps away, somewhere in the ether.
So I’d start jamming around the the idea, collecting more ideas around that central core - and, in a flurry of inspiration, this wave would gain momentum - the most pleasurable part.
Confidence would grow as the ideas spilled out faster and faster together with feelings of happiness and invincibility - thoughts like, “this is the best thing I’ve ever done”, and “I’m a fucking genius!”
Then, right at the peak of this euphoria, would come a brief but intense realization of confusion as all the parts I’d come up would suddenly seem not to fit. It would be as if all the incredible beauty I had seen before had evaporated, and I was left with the mess of its remains.
Shock and dejection would follow as I’d look around at the all the un-matchable lyrics scattered around the floor, and listen to the hurriedly recorded bits jangling in the speakers, and as the initial dream of the song faded to nothing, I would feel hopelessness and desolation - thoughts like, “I hate songwriting”, I’ll never write a song again”.
In later years I learnt that this was the time to walk away - but in the stubbornness of youth, I often used to exhaust myself trying to write my way through this valley of the spirit, only exhausting myself in the process.
The next stage would come after a break, whether voluntary or enforced. Whether an hour or a year, it’s amazing how a break can clear a congested mind. I’d come back and immediately see something new in the mess of what I’d done. So, though the original dream would be gone, a new one would arise like a phoenix from its ashes and the next wave up would begin, usually resulting in a finished song, and my confidence as a songwriter would be vindicated.
At the time I called these phases ‘thresholds of pain’ and as I became more experienced I got used to them, even predicting when they would occur. And in conversation with other songwriters, as well as authors and painters, I learnt that they too, all had their own strategies for surmounting these thresholds.
This wave formation is innate to the learning of any new skill - and it’s especially present in learning how to meditate.
When I was training people to meditate, I watched so many pass through the usual wave patterns - elation, then the subtle arrogance of ease, then having it all fall in a heap as their practice and motivation seemingly dissipated - at which point some would give up right at the time when it seemed most hopeless - which was usually, ironically, just before the next breakthrough.
For me as a trainer, it was excruciating when a trainee would decide to give up. As they reiterated each others plaintive declarations of defeat, saying, “It’s just not for me”, or “I’m just no good at it”, I always knew that right at that moment of defeat, they were closest to the next breakthrough and it was up to me as a trainer to help them see this. So the hard work would begin - the battle to keep them going through their valley of doom, even as their mind told them it was hopeless, they don’t have time, and so on.
Because the conscious mind is such a tawdry politician. It will always ‘follow the polls’, so to speak, chanting the litany of whatever temporary phase is happening in the mind/body - particularly negative phases, anxiety or pain, because they are the most compelling.
Mountain climbers and marathon runners say their greatest challenge is not the physical task they undertake, so much as it is their conscious mind - the hysterical mess of thoughts screaming for them to stop. These thoughts are a part of any endeavor and they do a bad cop good cop routine with the more subtle and soothing thoughts that tell you you don’t need to do this: “my life is complete without this” , and “I could be comfortable at home” ...and the most compelling of all - “it’s obviously not the right time for me to do this”.
All of these thoughts, the viciously demoralizing ones and the soothing procrastinators, are designed to get you to balk at whatever threshold you’re stuck at - to stop you passing through the fire to victory at the other side.
In a book I wrote on meditation practice,’ Happy to Burn’, I said of this:
“The ego is threatened by meditation because it fears change. It equates change, even if it is positive, with danger and the possibility of death - not necessarily death of the organism, but death of itself. It is of no matter that many of our habits limit our life, or even threaten our survival; the Ego will always try to keep the status quo, because that’s all it’s ever known.
Its operating creed is: ‘The way things have always been is best because it works. How do I know it works?
‘Well, I’m alive aren’t I?’ That is all it cares about - survival, not quality, or happiness, or satisfaction; just brute survival.
So the ego will resist any attempts that are made to change the way it functions, and in this campaign of resistance it has all our conditioned habits of laziness, procrastination, fear, desire, guilt, anger and hatred to draw on as an arsenal of coercive weapons. We all have conditioned weaknesses in our personalities, and it is these that will arise in practice of meditation.”
I’ll finish with a quote that always sits at the back of my head, reminding me of what’s important - it was said in an interview by Peter Brook, a British stage director:
"Never stop. One always stops as soon as something is about to happen."
@ Friday, Jan. 04, 2008 – 04:52:34 pm
Was going to blog about other things then changed my mind and decided to give you a picture of thinking, and a thought I've been thinking.
It's interesting the thoughts that a death creates. Sort of burns a new set of neural patterns into the head that alter everything, sending old predictable thoughts in entirely new and surprising direction.
Thinking
When looked at from a distance, a life often seems like an unsolvable puzzle that can only be worked out in retrospect. Like, we live relentlessly forward, pushing our way through a ceaseless hail of the new, most of which seems totally chaotic.
And all the while we have very little idea of what’s going on until we stop to look back.
It’s only in this process of review that we can clearly identify the sequences of cause and effect that lead us here, to this point. We look back and see a coherent stream of events that give our life sense and we draw solace from that. We draw solace from the knowledge that at least now we can identify why things happened the way they did - and that makes life seem to make sense I suppose. In remembering we’re able to imbue our life with the logic we require of it. After all, we have a brain whose intrinsic nature is to make patterns.
But really, this sense of logic we get from retrospect, is illusory. Any path we took would make sense when looking back at our footprints. It's just that, in looking back, we forget that each step we took was taken in the dark - not knowing what was going to happen, or what coincidences might arise from what we were about to do.
The future is chaos, the past makes sense, because we give it sense.
But regardless of whether the sense we make of life is actual or illusory, perhaps it is the only reward of growing old. The closer we get to death, life seems to make more sense simply because their is more of the logical past, and less of the chaotic future. With only the past stretching back behind us, life finally begins to sit nicely within the neural patterns of the brain ... and it all begins to make sense.
Perhaps it’s this quality that makes old age a wonderful reward - the prize at the end of the long obstacle course we run in the dark, when we finally give up the struggle to understand why we live.
Sorry about these maudlin thoughts ... (actually, that should be morbid thoughts) ... I'll spark up in a while ...
@ Monday, Dec. 24, 2007 – 01:30:54 am
Death never makes sense.
Though all of us are inexorably headed toward it, and though we know it is happening all around us, it doesn't make sense.
Though we reassure ourselves with religion, science - beliefs in reincarnation and the afterlife - still, when death appears it never makes sense.
Someone close to me died the other night. We watched him, in the hospital, breathing with the help of a machine, comatose, his brain flooded with blood.
For eight hours we waited and watched, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes whispering in his ear, telling him we loved him, telling him he could let go now, that it was alright.
And all the time, though I knew his brain had effectively died five hours ago, and I knew his body was going to die very soon, still my mind couldn't accept it.
I couldn't accept it because his body still breathed, the chest rising and falling - the pulse in the hand I held was still strong, and his body was still warm. He was alive. That face I had spoken too, and shared thoughts with, that body I had hugged hello and goodbye. He was alive.
Then the doctor came and after making sure he had permission, he ushered us out while he and the nurses disconnected the breathing apparatus. We waited down the hall until they called us up, and as I walked back up I saw his body struggling on the bed as it clung to each breath.
His eyes were half open and in the dim room, they seemed to be looking into mine though I knew they saw nothing. And again we waited, holding his hands, his feet, hugging his struggling body as each quivering breath came, then went ... came then went ... until the body couldn't do it anymore. One spasm, then another ... then one more.
Only then, in the incredible stillness of death, did I finally realize that this body before me was no longer him. It was already an empty thing.
He was dead, and it still didn't make sense. For all the incredible insights I've had in my life, the thinking I've done, the intelligence I've built and fed with information - this death still doesn't make sense.
Goodbye Rafik. You'll always be missed.
@ Friday, Dec. 14, 2007 – 04:03:23 pm
Gee, the year is nearly ended.
To all my blog friends, thanks for being out there, and such good people. I sometimes imagine all the good people I know, all over the world, as being something like Indra's net.
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions.
In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net's every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.
If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.
Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite
the Avatamsaka Sutra
Francis H. Cook: ‘Hua-yen Buddhism : The Jewel Net of Indra’
So this card, which I sent to all my real life friends, is also for all of you, the friends I've never met, all the jewels in Indra's net.
@ Saturday, Dec. 01, 2007 – 05:30:44 pm
Every so often in a life one meets an exceptional being, someone so unique and inspiring they enhance life simply by being who they are. There’ve been a couple of people like this in my life, but in this special case, it was a very small and emaciated kitten with paralyzed legs who inspired me.
I found some photos of him the other day, which reminded me of what an extraordinary creature he was. His name was Windmill Stumblebum, and I thought I’d write this post for him, because I’ve never forgotten him.
I hope you enjoy this story of our short friendship and the place it happened in.
Windmill looking misty.
I got to know Windmill over four months in 1992 at the Sorn Thawee Meditation Center in Chacheongsao, Thailand, where I’d gone for a four month meditation retreat - the second of many over the coming years.
I’d say at that time, in a compound covering about 20 acres, there would have been, at a rough estimate, about 30 or 40 full grown dogs - and the same number of cats - none of them neutered, so in breeding season they all give birth at a prodigious rate.
It’s like this in most monasteries in Thailand. In general, the Thai people are not kind to stray animals, so most animals without homes gravitate to the monasteries. There, the Buddhist monks and nuns, while not exactly encouraging them to stay, nevertheless give what they can to any animal that needs it.
As a result the monasteries of Thailand are home to a large population of wildlife, all jostling and competing with one another for space and food.
I arrived in June, the hottest time - the worst season to be in Thailand - a time when only mad dogs and stupid ‘farang’ like me were out in the sun. Sweating like a pig under the weight of a huge back pack, I wandered in through the gates of Sorn Thawee to find an explosion of new life. It was the end of breeding season, so the entire monastery was jumping with pups, kittens and chickens, squawling, tweeting, yapping and mewling from under stairs, bushes, everywhere.
For most of these new-born creatures, life is very, very hard. Though the monks and nuns give leftover food, the sheer number of animals competing for these scraps makes it likely that at least half of the new-born will be killed off within a month. But during August and October it’s even harder. As the wet season gets underway, most of those who survived the Summer are killed off by the huge range of diseases that come with the extreme humidity of the rainy season. At those times the smell of death is everywhere as creatures born only months ago curl up in quiet places to die, becoming food for ants, flies and bacteria.
But the monks and nuns step lightly though it all - this yearly drama of sex, birth, death - seeing but never interfering because after all it’s simply nature. They give what food they can and that’s as far as it goes - nature takes care of things in its own way.
No food left
The day I settled into the hut I’d been allocated, I could smell death coming in whiffs through the window. Looking around outside, I found the swollen body of a dead kitten under the bridge nearby. It was being consumed by a heap of red ants. Standing next to the corpse was another kitten so starved and diseased it too was almost dead. It was swaying slightly as it idly batted at ants with its paw.
To save myself from the smell I decided to move the corpse further down the bank of the pond. But when I went to pick it out of this mass of ants, they swarmed up my arm, biting viciously. So voracious were these ants, I noticed they were already hard at work consuming the tail of the sick kitten who'd settled nearby - and it wasn’t even dead yet.
I finally managed to move the dead kitten further down the bank of the pond.After a short period of confusion the highway of ants soon found the new location, as did the sick kitten, who followed the body of its friend. Though I tried to coax it away, it seemed not to want to move, so I left it there to its fate. With so much death around, and no resources to save it, there was nothing else I could do.
The next day it too was dead and covered with ants.
Over the following days, during afternoon breaks from meditation, I would go down to see how long it would take the ants to pick the two dead bodies clean, and I noticed a fascinating thing.
By the second day the ants had picked the legs, eyes and tails clean, but left the torsos intact. I found this strange, particularly because both were now filled with maggots.
I wondered why the ants were allowing maggots to consume their property.
The other thing was, I would have thought the maggots would be perfect food for ants, so again, I couldn’t work out why the ants were ignoring them.
By the third day the ants had totally disappeared though the torsos were still seething with maggots, which were now so plump they looked as if they would burst.
Then, on the fourth day it all became clear. I came back to find a long thick highway of ants carrying the maggots away. How smart is that? Rather than going through the fuss of dismembering the kitten themselves, the ants let the maggots do all the work, then took them - each one a perfect package of food.
I could write a lot more about the amazing ways of Thai ants, but I’m trying to keep to the point, so maybe I’ll do that another time.
'Mama' cat with the kids
The next day, after the morning meal, I was just resuming practice when I heard an adult cat snarling and spitting. This in itself was not unusual. It’d usually lead to a full-on scuffle then be over - another cat fight in a day punctuated by many.
But the growling and spitting went on for the next half an hour. And considering how hot it was, and the difficulties I was having staying awake as I meditated, it became extremely irritating.
On opening the door of my hut, on the bank of the pond, I found a ring of seven tiny kittens crouched around a big gray cat who I assumed to be their mother. I assumed this because she was pacing up and down, growling and snarling at them, and if one of the kittens dared move or even twitch, she’d clout it over the head with a paw. Like a chastened child the kitten would crouch penitently down, flattening its ears and glancing surreptitiously at its siblings as if to say: “We are sooo in the shit.”
Over following weeks I found this to be her usual disposition when any of her brood were nearby. She seemed to hate the sight of them. Like a jaded suburban mother who’s absolutely had it with kids, she’d snarl and spit and slash if she saw them.
Of course, the kittens, being very young, were still in the habit of following her about, all perky and playful - until she’d spin about and give them another piece of her mind, when they’d immediately crouch, eyes averted and ears flattened until she wandered on, still growling irritably - then they’d perk up again.
But as irritable as she was, it turned out this gray cat took her mothering very seriously.
The monastery kitchen
On any typical day, around mid-day, a kitchen-woman would bring food for the animals - usually a large tray of left-over rice and vegetables from the morning meal. She’d walk across the bridge and put it on the bank of the pond, close to my hut.
Of course, a large collection of dogs and cats would have collected around the kitchen in expectation of this event, and they’d all be jostling around her as she came out with the tray. But this mob from the kitchen would never make it more than halfway across the bridge, because the gray ‘Mama’ cat would position herself at the head and put on such a ferocious performance it’d stop them in their tracks. With her hair standing on end, ears tucked back and fangs fully bared, potential challengers always thought it much wiser to wait than to take her on.
Mama’ cat would hold her position there on the bridge as her kittens leapt headlong into the food, and she'd stay until the last of them had finished. Only then would she back off off and, after taking a few bites of her own, saunter away, snarling wearily as if to say:” “Kids!!! Who’d have ‘em!”
This was exceptional, but her protectiveness went even further than that.
Sometimes, particularly when I first began feeding my leftovers to the kittens, she’d make sure to check the food, attacking any kitten who got to it before her. At first I thought she was being greedy, keeping the food for herself, but she never took anything - just sniffed it to check it was okay, then she’d wander off with the usual snarls and growls, leaving the crew to dive in.
Bumhole looking sultry
Gradually over a few weeks, natural attrition whittled this group of seven down to three kittens I named Bumhole, Whinger and Butch ... Windmill Stumblebum joined a little later to make the fourth in the crew.
Bumhole had some sort of wasting sickness, so she was all bones and skin and her fur was very thin. And she had some kind of distemper that had taken away her voice - she couldn’t meow - just croaked.
I called her Bumhole because her rectum was so distended it poked out from beneath her tail - it was sort of a feature of the kitten.
Strangely enough, as sick as she looked, her grip on life was quietly tenacious. She was still alive when I left, when other, more healthy looking kittens had died.
Whinger and Butch asleep
Whinger is a ginger kitten, personality as the name I gave her. Though relatively healthy, she didn’t like to play or muck about like the other kittens - she’d just whine and whinge at my screen door all day.
Butch, (black and white) was the strong one. The rare times Mama cat wasn’t about, Butch was the one who would stand and fight no matter how big the assailant. Once I saw her stand up to a tomcat five times her size who’d wandered into the kittens territory - a huge scarred brute.
Butch put on a magnificent show, crouched with her tiny back haunches primed to attack, ears down, teeth bared - a minute puffball of fury spitting and swiping with her barely formed claws.
The tomcat paused for a few seconds, looking down as if in mild surprise. With a single clout it sent Butch spinning over the easement into the pond where she immediately began scrabbling her way back up to have another go.
Such an impressive little thing was Butch - always quietly confident, and protective of her kin.
But then there was Windmill.
Windmill in possession. This particular day, Windmill had stolen a small fish from the kitchen. He came bumbling over the bridge with it in his mouth and wouldn't let anyone, not dog, human or cat, take it from him. Check out the look in his eyes.
I never knew where Windmill came from. He sort of stumbled in from nowhere, seeming to have no family, no mother, and no territory. He just appeared, instantly noticeable by his strange gait.
You see, Windmill had some kind of spinal injury - at least that’s what I think it was, because he had no control over the back half of his body. He was filthy for that reason, because with his disability it was impossible to clean himself.
But somehow, being the resourceful kitten he was, he’d survived the obstacle course of the monastery and taught himself to walk - an incredible feat on its own considering most able bodied kittens died just trying to survive.
Bumbling along dragging his injured back half behind him, if he wanted to pick up the pace he’d get this set look in his eyes. Then, lowering his head and jutting it forward he’d just go for it, back legs wind-milling madly and his bum veering from side to side like a drunk sailor bouncing off walls. From that point until he collided with whatever he was headed for, it was a momentum driven exercise, determined by the set focus of his eyes.
But what was most amazing was the blind obedience of his ruined back legs which, spinning madly, followed the brute will of his head, wherever he went. Hence the name I gave him, Windmill Stumblebum.
The other kittens hated Windmill, because he didn’t belong. And yet he wouldn’t leave. Once he’d decided that this was the place to be (and it was, considering the constancy of food), he stayed on, regardless of the snarling, growling and slashing from the other kittens. He slowly insinuated himself into the crew over a number of weeks, simply by always being there, mooching about in the background or scrabbling along behind the pack.
As well as being the most persistent creature I've ever known, I think Windmill was the most aggressively hungry of the kittens I’ve known, because the first time I went to pat him he began gnawing at my big toe, obviously thinking it was meat.
And whenever food appeared he’d go totally mad, darting about in front of the crew with lights in his eyes, back legs spinning impossibly, like: ‘Where’s the food! Where’s the food!’ As soon as the food hit the ground, no matter if there were six or seven other kittens there before him - he’d launch himself through, plunging in head first, chewing before he’d even got a mouthful.
Of course, this manic behavior around food caused the other kittens much aggravation, but he didn't care - just kept eating.
One time I saw two kittens swipe him so hard from either side of where he was wolfing down their food their claws got stuck in his skull. But Windmill kept right on. The two kittens went into a panic trying to extract their claws but they were embedded so deep they couldn’t, so in the end they gave up and went back to eating with their claws still stuck in Windmill’s head.
Windmill’s tenacity and will at those times was absolutely stunning.
As inundated as the monastery was with animals and birds, other than leaving left over food, the Thais felt no need to care for them. To them animals and birds are like trees and insects - they feed them simply because they were alive, in the same way as they water plants. But rarely will you see a Thai person pat a stray dog or a cat or play with them - they consider animals too dirty to touch.
So it's fair to say that before I arrived these kittens had never been touched by a human, or played with. It’s understandable then, that when in my afternoon break I began feeding and playing with them, I awakened a thirst for affection that was almost unquenchable.
My teacher, Phra Manfred, asked me why I did this. I told him it was kindness. He shook his head wearily.
“This is not kindness,” he said. “You are creating suffering, because you are creating attachment in their hearts. One day you will be gone. What will they do then? They will suffer.”
He was right. I hadn’t thought that far ahead and in that I was guilty of sentimentality and self indulgence. But I figured it was too late now. The damage was done. The kittens had adopted the bushes around my hut as their territory and me as a friend, so I figured I might as well give them what I could over the next months.
Windmill taking a break from trying to walk.
Usually I’d only leave my hut twice each day - once to go to the daily interview with my teacher, then at about 4.30 PM I’d step outside to stretch, walk or play with the kittens for an hour before going back to work.
So the crew got to know that this was the time to party. About 4 PM they’d begin congregating around my wire screen door.
I’d know they were there because Whinger would bat at the screen with a paw, making it rattle, then she’d start whinging, opening and closing her mouth, bringing forth the most extensive vocabulary of meows I've ever heard. The others would just sit waiting in a ring as if listening closely as Whinger told the screen door about her day.
When I eventually came out, the whole crew would start milling about, jostling with one another, purring and curling up beneath my hands as I stroked them.
Only Windmill would hang back. I found it interesting that as badly injured as he had been, Windmill was the most independent of them all. Never once did he lose himself in an anxious thirst for my affection like the other kittens.
At these times it seems, his interest was not in me so much as inclusion in the gang. He didn’t want to be patted. He wanted to play - to be accepted by the other kittens.
So he'd sit back watching them mill around me for a short while then, overtaken with a fit of brotherly enthusiasm, he'd think to get a game going. Crouching down behind the crew with a bright playful look on his face, after wiggling his bum for a bit, he’d leap ineptly onto their backs.
Their reaction seemed never to be what he expected - they’d throw him off with much snarling and slashing of claws. Repelled so abruptly, he’d immediately pretend disinterest, becoming fascinated with a nearby leaf as if that had actually been what he was interested in. He’d prove this by batting it about for a while, then bumble off to the side to wash his paws for a while.
Having saved face in this manner, he’d then take to mooching about in the general vicinity until something else caught his interest. And something always did. Unlike the other kittens, Windmill was never at a loss for something to do.
One day, after he'd been spurned by the crew once again, Windmill lost his footing on the side of the path and tumbled down to the edge of the pond. Having spent most of his life on the paths around the huts where the action was, I don't think he'd ever been so close to water, because he immediately became fascinated as he discovered there were fish darting about just below. I was watching him, and it was if he’d been given an electric shock, his fascination was so instant and so strong.
Ignoring the fact that he had no power or control in his back legs, he edged down to the concrete rim of the pond and, teetering precariously, began reaching down to paw at the fish. “He’s going to go in,” I thought and sure enough, ten seconds later, plop, he disappeared into the water.
By the time I got to him he was already submerged, front legs paddling in vain as his paralyzed back end sank beneath him. I remember looking down at him looking up at me, and his yellow eyes seemed to be glowing up from beneath the water, more from surprise than fear.
Reaching in, I grabbed him by an ear and pulled him out and, spluttering and sneezing, placed him back up on the path. He sat shaking his head for a second, looking even more pathetically scrawny than usual, then he tried to shake the water off but only succeeded in falling over because his back legs collapsed.
When next I looked he was stalking a leaf he'd found dancing in the wind.
Two months later the relentless heat gave way to the wind, thunder and lightening of the rainy season which came like an invading army. And though the inundation of rain transformed the parched monastery into a verdant paradise, the accompanying humidity brought disease that killed off many more of the animals.
The remnants of the crew however, survived, largely because of the bad tempered care of their mother. And Windmill, the interloper, was also a beneficiary. Though still filthy, he was not so scrawny as he had been when he first began hanging around the crew, and though they still tried to ignore him, the other kittens now reluctantly accepted that he was a part of their crew - so didn't make such a fuss over food.
Windmill at the door
It took about a week of solid rain to fill the lake at the center of the monastery. It was amazing to behold, as what had previously been a fetid, lifeless mud pit quickly filled with with new water and fish magically reappeared.
But these were not like fish I have ever seen. These fish walked.
It happened one morning after a particularly heavy downpour. For the last week, the entire surface of the lake had been exploding with fish, flicking themselves into the air as if incredibly happy. So that morning I was on my way through a moderately heavy rain to the morning interview, when I found a couple of these fish wriggling on the path.
Thinking I was helping, I picked them up and threw them back into the lake, only to find more fish further down the path, again wriggling about as if stranded.
It was only then that I realized that the fish were jumping out of the lake, flicking themselves out through the rain onto the banks, then using their fins, they were struggling up to the path, then ‘walking’. Using their gills and fins, they’d struggle along, seemingly set on going somewhere - I'm not sure where.
All the monks and nuns were out in the rain, stepping over them and laughing. I found the Acharn standing by the lake with his hands behind his back, and he too was laughing at all these fish promenading along the paths.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he said
“Why are the fish walking?”
Through a big grin he threw out his arms in the rain and said, “Because they are happy fish.”
I walked away thinking in my ponderous Western way, ‘Can fish be happy?’
Then I saw a big one - about three feet long. It leapt out of the water and landed on the bank, thump, to start scrabbling away from the water up the bank toward the path.
Whole families of fish were flicking themselves out of the water to wriggle and flip their way along the bank and the paths for up to quarter of an hour, before rolling themselves back down into the water - though some were found up to two hundred meters away, up in the pine forest, either lost or extraordinarily adventurous - but strangely, still alive.
It occurred to me then that perhaps the Acharn was right. After all, human beings are happy to dive into water to swim in the watery world of fish - so it makes an odd sense that when fish are happy, they should leap out of the water to walk about in the airy world of humans.
But ... sorry, I digress ... back to Windmill.
A part of his physical disability was that he’d get constipated because his back part was paralyzed - yet he kept on stuffing food down, joyfully disregarding the consequences. So if he ate a particularly big meal, for the next day or two he’d stagger about looking like a furry black balloon. Sometimes he’d be so painfully swollen I expected him to explode in a shower of catshit and fur, but Windmill never seemed fussed by it. He’d go on bumbling about as if it was nothing exceptional.
Eventually he’d return to his original shape, though I never saw him have a shit - I saw a lot of tries, but nothing ever came out.
He’d go through the elaborate prelude of finding a spot, scratching at the ground. Then after falling over and repositioning himself a couple of times he’d squat expectantly, concentrating for a few seconds, during which absolutely nothing would happen.
After a while he’d turn and check behind him to see what he’d created, searching fruitlessly when nothing appeared, then turn around, squat, and go through the whole thing again. I realized later that he probably had no sensation in his read end, so couldn't tell if anything had happened unless he checked.
Eventually he’d give up. But the lack of completion never deterred him from scratching a pile of dirt over the spot then giving it one more wishful sniff before he left.
As I said, Windmill was finally accepted by the crew. I think Butch, Whinger and Bumhole just gave in to his persistence eventually, because Windmill never gave up. He always came back no matter how much they mauled and insulted him.
But what was more extraordinary was that as months went by I realized that Windmill was accepted everywhere.
You see, pressure of population made the patchwork of territories very complex, and very tight. Every animal had a very small area to move in without coming into violent conflict with another animal. I’d seen cats get viciously attacked if they ventured too far from my hut - dogs would kill each other for minor transgressions.
But Windmill - when he wasn’t mooching around my hut I realized he was floating around all over the place - Over the four months I was there I spotted him all over the monastery - up near the Acharn's house, down by the rubbish pits, across the lake, or over where the great hall was being built.
He was everywhere.
Where all animals here by necessity had a territory, Windmill had none, yet all territories were open to him. An impossible thing for any animal in a place like this, yet for this crippled little skerrick of life it seemed no boundaries existed. An incredible thing.
Not only that, but also unlike the other kittens, he played with dogs.
One day I saw one of the dogs follow him as he bumbled across the kitchen, then knock him over with its nose. And just as I thought to intervene, with Windmill lying on his back beneath this dogs mouth, the dog scratched Windmills scrawny little belly with its teeth.
That in itself was amazing, particularly considering the dog was ten times the size of Windmill. But more unusual was the incredible trust Windmill had when the dog grabbed him in its mouth and started shaking him upside down.
Somehow Windmill knew the dog wouldn’t hurt him, just as he knew he could go anywhere in the monastery and remain untouched.
Just as the kittens had accepted him, so it appeared had every other animal in the monastery. Windmill was impossibly loved. This tiny, crippled kitten from nowhere seemed to create kindness, trust and good heart wherever he went.
Windmill eventually learned how to get into my hut while I was meditating.
There were two doors, one a heavy wooden door, the other a light, wire-screen door. I usually kept the wooden door open all day and the screen door closed with a sarong slung over it, and Windmill discovered that if he took a running head-butt at my screen door it would slip out of its catch and open.
So for the last month I was there, he got to coming and going as he pleased. I’d be sitting meditating on the bench and I’d hear ‘crash!’ and know that Windmill had arrived.
Then I’d hear ‘scrabble, scrabble’ as he crossed the floor ... then ‘fall, slip’ as he struggled to get a grip on the edge of the bench ... then ‘scrabble, scrabble, pant, pant’ as he pulled himself up onto the bench.
Next would come the pungent odor of garbage as Windmill’s hot little body insinuated itself into my lap, settling himself down, then purring as he fell asleep.
Windmill on the bridge
After four months of meditation, I left the monastery.
A year later I returned and Windmill had disappeared, presumably dead. Another generation of kittens was fighting to survive. No-one remembered him, or spoke of him, except me.
When I'd arrived at the monastery I'd been full of self pity and doubt, and he had shown me something I'd forgotten. The worth of courage, a strong will and a good heart, and for this I regard him as one of my teachers.
