In Memoriam--Layla Smith Bockhorst

 

My Zen teacher, Layla Smith Bockhorst, has died. It happened on November 3, after a not-very-long illness with cancer of the cecum, metastasizing to the liver, with which she was diagnosed several months ago. The diagnosis sounded rather dire, in that she was told she had stage four cancer, which is about as dire as it gets. Yet she dealt with that diagnosis as she dealt with everything else: with quiet dignity, carrying on with her teaching duties with our Mountain Source Sangha as well as, and as often as she could. We in the sangha, seeing her mostly on Zoom for our Tuesday and Friday morning zazen meetings, hoped she might be recovering, mainly because we never heard her complain—though she was truthful about being in some discomfort, and not being able to eat very well. This was her way: undramatic, unassuming, preferring always not to be conspicuous, and emphasizing mostly the quiet, fundamental Zen practice of just sitting in zazen (classically, sitting cross-legged with back straight, and focusing on whatever is in front of one, in the moment). 

            At my age, I am not unacquainted with death, having had both parents, a wife, a sibling, a niece and friends die, as well as three Zen teachers: my first teacher, Robert Aitken Roshi, with whom I trained usually at annual summer sesshins for more than ten years; Joko Beck, with whom I trained, also at sesshins both in Oakland and in San Diego, for several more years; and now Layla Smith, whom I have come to appreciate mostly via Zoom. There have been other teachers, to be sure, but most, like Stuart Kutchins with whom I study via Zoom also, are still living. But never has one of my teachers died while I was actively practicing with her. This time it has hit closer to the bone. That may be because when a Zen teacher dies, it has an uncanny and, to me, indefinable resonance. It is as if we somehow think of these “honored teachers” as immortal—which all are diligent to teach us they are not. Yet we still think it. So when a valued teacher dies, it is almost as if one’s parent or partner or a part of oneself has vanished. 

            That may be because death, to those of us living, is still the great mystery. We know it is bound to happen. We may even know, as with cancer or advanced age, that it is coming soon. And yet, when faced with the fact of death, of a dead body—as I found out when my late wife, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and was lying “brain dead” in a hospital bed kept alive by a respirator but still alive, suddenly stopped—we recognize death instantly. I am referring here to the change that occurs even before we notice that breathing or heartbeat has stopped, even before we get medical confirmation that it is over. We know. The irreducible and incomprehensible phenomenon that is life suddenly departs. And we don’t know what it is. This pertains among animals or plants or anything alive. We instantly know a living entity, and we just as instantly recognize a dead one. And it is not simply that outward movement has stopped. Because what we have learned from high-energy physics is that even inert bodies, dead bodies, rocks and metals, still have ceaseless motion in their innermost, subatomic elements. So life cannot be defined by movement, nor death by the absence of movement. What is it then? We don’t know; we can’t define it. Which was brought home to me when my oldest son saw his mother lying in that white bed, having, just minutes before he arrived, stopped. Seeing her, he collapsed to his knees and said, referring to that now utterly still, cold, rigidifying body, “What is that? What is that? That is not her!”  

            If we were to follow most Judeo-Christian religions, we might say of the dead person that the “soul” has left the body. But the Buddha prefigured modern science when he announced his doctrine of “anatta,” or no separate self or soul. Modern materialist science agrees. Nothing we can identify as a “self” or a “soul” can be located in a human body. In its place, most science states or implies that the brain is the essence of life. Hence that awful term we heard referring to my wife, brain dead. When the brain stops functioning, that is, life ceases—so life is brain function, according to science. But of course, plants do not have brain function or even nervous systems, yet living plants or flowers or trees or leaves are clearly alive. And when they wither and shrivel to the ground, they are dead. We all know that. So what is it that animates those entities that are alive. As far as I know, no one has yet been able to locate this animating something. Which is why some philosophers like Bergson coined the term elan vital, and poets like Dylan Thomas in his great poem, referred to it as a force, the “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Alternatively, some novelists like Mary Shelley seemed to imagine the life force as  electricity—hence the astonishment when the human-built Frankenstein monster first moves, and the shout bursts out: “It’s alive!” And yet we know that simple electricity, such as that which seems to animate computers, leaves them just as dead as ever, even before the plug is pulled. And so life and death remain to us, still, just as profound and mysterious. 

            But I digress. My honored teacher, Layla, no longer manifests motion, or life. That is, her human form, with which we are compelled to associate her, no longer has what we call ‘life.’ She will no longer be able to go on her beloved bike rides through the mountains and valleys and trees of California. She will no longer be able to take sustenance from the so-precious-to-her natural world. She will no longer be able to appear to us on Zoom to give one of her talks on Zen—low-key talks that usually employed numerous references to her favorite Zen writers, like her teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who likewise died of cancer; or Eihei Dogen, the 13th Century Zen ancestor and founder of the lineage from which most modern Zen, and Layla herself, derives. No longer will she be able to deliver essential insights, as she did in her last brief talk, when she said something like, ‘When will you stop thinking you lack something?’ And then, ‘but even when you do, you can regard it as a gift—and, sitting, catch its arising.’ Nor will she be able to embody for us her main teaching—her simple but wise presence that sought no limelight, that was most comfortable avoiding it, preferring simple, quiet zazen to all else. 

And that may be, in the end, what Zen teachers have most to offer: the simple essence of living; of being, above all, human; of being even preternaturally human—but being, as Joko Beck titled one of her books, nothing special. That was, to me, Layla’s essence, and that which, I have come to think, is the true essence of Zen: To be human beings, secure in our knowledge that living is simply ‘things as it is,’ as Suzuki Roshi used to say; ‘nothing special’ as Joko used to say; just a tall, lanky guy in a Hawaiian shirt, as Aitken Roshi was when I first met him. And as Layla Smith was and remains: just a tall, unassuming woman from Montana who somehow found, years ago, that the way of life presented by Zen suited her as nothing else ever had or would, and which she embodied to her last breath with dignity and courage and quiet robed grace—and the practice/realization that she was ok, had always been ok, and was going home, going beyond, to her true, abiding no-self. And teaching to the end that we, her grateful and now-grieving students, “standing or walking, sitting or lying down, practicing the way with gratitude,” with all existence, were and are the same. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

                                      

Ukraine's Pre-historic Mega-Sites

 

Given all the coverage of Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, and Vladimir Putin’s justification of his 'special operation' as stemming from Ukraine’s lack of historic independence, one would think that some mention would have been made of the important pre-history of Ukraine. But so far, I have seen none. I was only made aware of these facts by reading Graeber and Wengrow’s pathbreaking work (David Graeber’s last), The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Farrar-Straus, 2021. In that book, Graeber and Wengrow discuss the Mega-Sites that appeared in Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova during the Neolithic era, more than 5,000 years ago. The authors discuss recent research (the sites were discovered in the 1970s) establishing the astonishing fact that several excavations confirm that ‘cities’ such as Nebelivka, and Taljanky (ca. 20,000 residents) did in fact exist in Ukraine’s Uman district south of Kyiv, and pre-dated the supposed ‘first’ cities in the near East—Sumerian cities which are said to prove that large-scale agriculture led directly to bureaucracies, priesthoods, and powerful rulers. These Ukrainian sites seem to disprove that long-standing theory. 

            Regardless of the agriculture-to-cities debate, however, the existence of such sites, usually assembled in circular patterns, and consisting of individual groups of wooden houses that appear to have been more or less independent of a central ruler and/or government for as long as eight centuries, proves that civilization—or at least large self-governing communities—existed in Ukraine long before there was a Russia or a Soviet Union to claim hegemony over this land. And given the discussion about how Ukraine’s grain exports fed nearly half the globe before Russia’s invasion put an end to easy shipments of grain via Black Sea ports, it is enlightening to read that the reason such large populations could gather and thrive in pre-history must have been due to the soil. That is, as much as two-thirds of Ukraine has been blessed with a type of rich, black, exceptionally-fertile soil called chernozem (Russian for “black ground”). That is why grain grew and still grows so abundantly there; chernozem contains a high percentage of humus (4% to 16%) and high percentages of phosphoric acids, phosphorus, and ammonia. So valuable is it (it is 60 inches deep in Ukraine) that it has been sold on the black market for years. 

            The name given to these early cultures by pre-historians is Cucuteni-Trypillia. Though there is some dispute about their nature (i.e., whether they were permanent living sites or were occupied only temporarily; whether they should be called ‘cities’ or ‘villages;’ what kind of rule kept them together, councils with shifting leadership, or more permanent leaders), what no longer seems in dispute is that these ‘mega-sites,’ consisting of thousands of individual houses and several larger communal structures, and  extending over hundreds of hectares, have caused the traditional view of the origin of cities to be re-evaluated, and perhaps changed for good. That is to say, most of these homes have been found to be almost self-sufficient, containing not only ovens for warming and cooking, but also kilns with which to make their distinctive pottery, and sacred altars for worship. So whereas traditional early cities were seen as gathering around rulers and a priesthood directing subservient masses to toil to produce wealth for those rulers, the mega-sites in Ukraine seem to have avoided all that paraphernalia, and its resultant inequality. Rules seem to have been made by neighborhood councils, rather then handed down from above. The design of these places—roughly circular groups of houses, none of which stands out from others—reinforces this notion of rough equality among its residents. 

            This evidence of the ancient habitation of Ukraine, to this writer, says volumes both about our notion of how humans initially gathered in large groups we call ‘cities,’ but also how it validates the current Ukrainian fight for independence from Russia. About how preposterous the Russian claims to justify its invasion are seen to be. And though Vladimir Putin probably has no idea of this pre-history, one wonders what would happen if he did. Would it change his tiny, imperial mind? Probably not. But perhaps it would give him dreams disturbing enough to make him pause his bloody work—which would not be a bad outcome, all things considered.  

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

            

            

 

Why Can't It Be the Way It Was?

 

The more I think about it, the more most of our human problems and dilemmas come down to one wish/desire/demand/yearning: ‘Why Can’t It Be the Way It Was?’  I’ve got one of those going on at the moment. Walking—which I’ve always done (after I could no longer run long distances, that is) has been my preferred exercise for years. It not only keeps me relatively sound physically and improves my mental state; it is also the way I’ve been controlling my blood glucose (I have diabetes, and so, walk after dinner), and more or less keeping my blood pressure in check. So I do it not only because it feels good, but because it may be saving my life. 

            Recently, however, a left knee that I injured running years ago, and have always managed to keep relatively OK via said walking, has begun to act up in a different way. Due to my stroke in 2019, my right-side function checked out. So, naturally, even after recovering some right-side capacity, I’ve had to put a lot more stress on that ailing left knee. That has worked reasonably well for a couple of years. But sooner or later, as we hate to admit, the imbalance begins to take its toll. I think that’s what’s happened, recently. A few weeks ago, my left-knee pain flared a few times when I came down on it awkwardly, perhaps, though I’m not even sure what the precipitating event was. Whatever it was, my body reacted automatically to that sharp pain in the front meniscus area, I think, by compensating. That is, I began to put more pressure on my left knee by leaning more on the back part of the knee. Though I worried about hyper-extension, I was told by my PT guy that I’m not really hyper-extending, but I know it’s in that direction. A few days or weeks of that, though, and now that pressured back of my knee hurts like hell. It hurts when I change positions from standing for awhile to sitting down: that is, from straight leg to bending. It hurts in the opposite direction too—from sitting for a time to standing and walking. And it hurts when I do my longer walk in the morning, and short one in the evening. Just in the last few days, the pain has even extended down into my left foot, sometimes causing my leg to buckle—a very worrisome development. Everything is connected, as they say. 

            My response is both despair—about whether and how long I’ll even be able to walk as I now do; or worse, whether I’ll fall—and desire: Why can’t my body keep going the way it always has? Why does it have to deteriorate in this way? Why can’t I take a pill to make the past return, or the present disappear? Or do exercises that will restore me to my former strength and health? Why, indeed. Time does not go backwards. And this is the point: no matter how fervently we want to go back to what we remember as our stronger, more capable days, it does not, can not happen. 

That’s the general situation we now face on several fronts, especially politically. Think of the MAGA zealots who unconditionally support our former President (even as the revelations regarding Jan. 6 become more damning by the day). What motivates them? Getting back to what they perceive as the “good old days,” that’s what. MAGA, in fact, stands for “make America great again”—i.e. let’s get back to when we were ‘great.’ But when we examine this ‘truism,’ we find that what these deluded folks really mean is “let’s get back to when it was great for me, for us, for white people.” We white people ruled then, before all these underlings of color began rising up to claim their (really our) places—'taking our jobs, our homes, our neighborhoods, even our Presidency. Before all these foreigners started invading from south of the border and coming here illegally to take our jobs, flooding the labor market with low-wage workers who depress the salaries of even those jobs we still have. Without question we ruled before that; and those of us who didn’t rule, no matter how low on the totem pole we were, could still say: “At least I’m not as low as those people; at least I always know I’m better than they are or can ever be.” 

            The ones who are more overt in their fervor make it even plainer. Groups who have been emboldened, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the Patriot Front and all the neo-Nazi groups (like the AWD, the Atomwaffen Division, aka National Socialist Order), by President Trump’s overt praise for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, now parade their arms and their hatred openly. They did this most vividly when they coordinated and led the assault on the national Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More recently, the young punk who killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo, NY supermarket openly espoused what is at the heart of all this hatred and murder and mayhem: The Great Replacement Theory. This is a theory first promoted in 2012 by French writer Renaud Camus, who opined that black and brown immigrants were being brought into Europe and America by nefarious forces, ‘reverse-colonizing,’ and wiping out the white-dominant culture in the West. In short, the root fear among white nationalists is that the White Race is being replaced by blacks and other people of color, whose greater birth rates threaten their hegemony; meaning they must fight back. And, as noted by Robert Bowers, who killed Jews in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack, this replacement is being promoted and implemented by Jews and other liberal-socialist-communist sympathizers who assist and enable immigrants to ‘invade and kill our people.’ In other words, ‘we yearn to go back to the white-dominated world we remember, and will do it by force if we have to.’ 

            One could go on. But the basic dynamic, here, is Change. And resistance to that change. 

We all remember, to be sure, when it was different. When, as children, we couldn’t wait for changes—in our bodies, in our height, in our status that would change us from kids with no power to grown-ups who could drink and drive and do whatever they wanted. We yearned for those changes, that growing up. Until, that is, we got there and then beyond it, and one day realized that the same process that had made us allegedly-autonomous adults was now working in the opposite direction. And we noticed the flesh of our faces and arms and legs and bellies beginning to sag a bit, and muscles in our arms and legs no longer enduring as long as they once did, and minds forgetting little things like names, and the location of keys or phones or turning off the gas jets when done cooking. Change, in short, became the enemy. 

            That is the way it is. We welcome change when it seems to work to our benefit. We hate it and try to reject it, especially when (and if) we realize that change is not only a some-time thing. Change is ubiquitous. Everything changes, and not just occasionally, but constantly. We can usually ignore this; can usually think we see objects that are solid and persist in their ‘true’ form forever—or at least as long as we need them to persist. But sooner or later, those of us who carefully observe life begin to realize that what we have always thought was stable and unchanging (like all material objects) has, in fact, been changing all along. Has never, in fact—not for a millisecond—stopped changing. And that realization extends with particular force to us, to our bodies and minds, to our very being—which must change and dissolve and disappear like everything else under the sun. 

            Still, there are those, and we see more and more of them in our U.S. society these days, who simply do not, will not accept the great law of change. They think that by shouting, and arming themselves, and gathering with their silly hats behind silly leaders who assure them that the ‘glory days’ can be recaptured, they can turn back the clock. America can be made Great Again. Mussolini in the 1930s followed this same delusional playbook: ‘Italy can be great again, can be the Roman Empire again.’ Hitler did something similar: ‘Germany can be great again, the Third Reich can conquer and rule the world.’ All tyrants, from Mao to Stalin to Napoleon to Putin; all political hacks—no matter which side of the political aisle they stem from—act on the same delusion: ‘The past can be recaptured.’ And they are always wrong. 

            To sum up what could be a very long and complex argument, the only genuine way to confront change is to accept it. Change is. No matter how fervently we yearn for a different reality, or ignore the evidence, we can never go back. Which is as simple to understand as it is hard to accept—personally or societally or politically. Difficult or not, however, there are no alternatives. All others lead to bitterness or idiocy or Armaggedon, or all three. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Truth, Again

 

I have written several times in recent years about the decline of simple truth in our time. Now I am prompted to write about truth and falsehood again because the situation is leading, and has led to both war, killing, and the complete collapse of even an elementary sense of ethics in one of the major nuclear nations and in one of our two major political parties. I am referring, of course, to Putin’s attack on Ukraine, with its attendant losses of life and civilian structures, and the outright lying in public from both this puta-tive leader, and the plague of lying which has overtaken the entire Republican Party. The latter is promoted, of course, primarily by Donald Trump’s confounding control over his “base,” which demands that his most egregious lie to date about winning the 2020 presidential election—which he claims was “stolen” from him by massive Democratic party fraud—be corrected by overturning the election, evicting Biden from office, and declaring Donald Trump President. This would be remarkable even if Trump were the only one subscribing to this whopper. But he is not. Millions of his American supporters believe this self-serving crap. Still more astonishing, large numbers of Republican office-holders actually insist that it is the truth. We seem to have entered Donald’s Wonderland. 

            There was a time—and I am old enough to remember it—when such a transparent lie coming from federal office holders would have prompted outrage from voters, public shame and humiliation for the liars, and calls for their resignation. No more. In our confused and benighted time, we have members of Congress, leaders of major parties, and countless state officials willing to repeat this outrageous lie, one that early on and repeatedly has been exposed as having no merit whatsoever. With almost no one in the entire Republican party, save Liz Cheney, willing to call what it and the Jan. 6 assault on those trying to certify a fair election, actually is: an assault by a mob on the most basic elements of our democracy. The peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. The constitutional duty of every member of Congress to certify electoral votes duly submitted to it by the states for approval and verification. Instead, most Republicans, including the leadership, have cowered in fear of Trump’s base, and denigrated and excoriated the Committee trying to investigate the Jan. 6 events, claiming that the rioters were simply exercising their right to visit the Capitol, and protest. Any news, such as that emanating from the New York Times or the Washington Post suggesting otherwise, is dismissed as “fake news.”

            What Trump has done in America finds its more sinister and lethal echo in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and his invasion of Ukraine. The lies are just as preposterous: Ukraine has never been a “real” nation; the war of invasion Russia has launched is not a war, but a ‘special military operation’ to oust the Nazis seeking control there; the destruction of cities and the slaughter of civilians is actually carried out by the Ukrainians themselves to make Russia look bad. Given Putin’s more thorough control of the state apparatus (which Trump openly envies), he can also control more completely what the Russian people can see and hear. So they see peaceful scenes of Russian troops being welcomed by their Ukrainian ‘brothers’; none of the scenes of the rubble-ization of Mariupol and other Russian cities whose apartments, theaters, and infrastructure have been terror bombed to a point not seen since Nazi destruction in WWII. Any Russian who questions this “truth” is branded a traitor to the nation, and subjected  to fines, arrest, and worse. Any news that contradicts this official truth is “fake capitalist news.” And all is backed by thinly-veiled threats to use the ultimate weapon if Russia’s sacred territorial integrity should be threatened. 

            The truly astonishing thing about the perpetration of such egregious lies is that, for a sizable and not-insignificant portion of the publics in each nation, this bullshit works. Recent news articles (see NY Times, Mar. 6, 2022) have shown that Ukrainians with relatives in Russia have been unable to penetrate the beliefs of even their parents about what they have experienced: that the Russian military is waging a brutal aerial, artillery and rocket-led assault amounting to a terror attack on civilians and their living spaces meant to demoralize the population. Instead, those in Russia believe what their media says: that the Russian ‘special military operation’ is saving Ukraine from drug-addled Nazis in power there. And as Ukrainian defenses have put up stiffer and stiffer resistance, the apparently-frustrated Russian military has resorted increasingly and more ferociously to indiscriminate bombing and artillery campaigns that many have labeled war crimes. With Russian officials and news media hiding the mounting deaths of their troops which, if publicly known, might blow the whole cover. 

To be sure, Aeschylus’ line that ‘truth is the first casualty in war,’ pertains as much today as it did in ancient Greece. But the demise of truth in our time has reached another and more dangerous dimension. That is because, with the rise of internet-based social media platforms, and the ability of governments to either control those internet outlets, or ban them outright, or provide others that contradict what major media choose to report, the labeling of any contradictory evidence as “fake news” becomes easier. Or, at the least, more confusing for the average citizen. In America,  those who have been addicted to the simplistic version of politics promulgated by Fox News, seem to find such simplicity both easier to digest and more consistent with their preferred narrative of events. 

The upshot of all this fakery and subterfuge is that elementary facts, which once provided the basis for what we might call “consensus reality,” no long pertain, and can no longer be taken for granted. Where once Walter Cronkite could intone on nightly TV his mantra “And that’s the way it is,” and count on most Americans taking his word for it, now millions can find their own preposterous version of “the way it is,” and feel more righteous than those who believe mainstream “fake news.” This amounts to a serious state of affairs, and a dangerous one. Democracy depends on a rough consensus among its citizens. It depends on most of its citizens agreeing, if not to the interpretation of major events, at least agreement on what those events are. Not any more. I have talked personally to a cousin who insisted that the Q-Anon-promoted canard about Hollywood child-abuse rings was the major issue of our time—one that Donald Trump was the only person with the moral authority to address. This about a proven narcissist and pervert who once spoke on the record about grabbing women’s pussies with impunity. It is simply mind-boggling. And anything that contradicts such a person’s “facts” can be met with what I was met with: “do some research.” With such a conflict about basic facts, a democracy cannot function, cannot reach consensus about what matters and what should be legislated. The rule of law, likewise, depends on a rough consensus—that most people will agree with the fact that everyone needs to stop at a traffic light, for example, or that murder is a capital offense that demands adjudication, abiding by proof and evidence, and punishment if warranted. Or that racism and lynching are unequivocally wrong, and cannot be permitted. If a society cannot agree on such basics, it cannot function as a society. 

But in our time, we increasingly have the collusion between power and truth that promotes, too often, the condition that power can make its own truth, create its own facts. This is precisely what is happening in Ukraine at this very moment. Vladimir Putin is creating his own reality, and insisting, with the power he has assembled, that the Russian people—and more generally, the whole world—accept that reality as the truth. Russian troops are not killing civilians; his brutal invasion is not a war; the destruction of apartment buildings and other civilian infrastructure witnessed by the entire world is not his military’s doing but that of the Ukrainians themselves. Trump, likewise, though with far more resistance, can insist that he had nothing to do with inciting or planning the Jan. 6 riot at the capitol; but, in any case, that the violent attempt to stop Congressional certification was more or less justified by the theft of his “victory” in the 2020 presidential election. Or that Americans might try ingesting bleach to protect  themselves from the Covid-19 virus. And those who report on these things, or demand some accounting, are simply the victims of the large, liberal conspiracy of the “fake new” media. What’s worse is that this nonsense can be openly admitted by those with power. During the George W. Bush administration, for example, journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 attributed the phrase “reaity-based community” to a Bush aide (thought to be Karl Rove) who said, in part: 

… that guys like me (Suskind) were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” [...] “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…” (Wikipedia, accessed 3/30/22)

 

Or, we might recall the inimitable Kellyanne Conway’s evocation of “alternative facts,” in a Meet the Press interview on Jan. 22, 2017, where she tried to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s lie about attendance numbers at Trump’s inauguration. This might have been considered a joke, were the words not uttered and defended with incredible zeal. 

            What’s even more baffling is that large numbers of the population, both in Russia (where they are compelled to) and in America (where the compulsion is internal), take this idiocy for the unvarnished truth. For the way things should be. Alternative facts? We create our own reality? Have people lost all touch with what used to be called “the real world?” Apparently they have. And the sum total of this willingness of those in power to “create their own reality,” can leave millions of ordinary citizens at sea in a swamp, a miasma of uncertainty, if not outright bedlam. 

            The question is, can democracies, which depend on the consent of the governed (all governments, ultimately, must have popular consent to stay in power), still assemble sufficient majorities on which to base that consent? Or disagreement? What will persuade enough people on this planet that global warming is not only real, but has very nearly reached the point of no return? What can persuade people to turn away from propaganda meant to serve a small, wealthy elite, and commit to vetted, scientific opinion that this crisis is real? That there are, in fact, substantiated facts? That the war in Ukraine is not only an actual war but a slaughter? That autocrats like Putin and Trump are both frauds and liars?

            I have to confess, the prospects from here don’t look good. Because in truth, the truth about reality is, even regarding normal facts, not easy to discern. Where power obscures it even more, it may be impossible for the average person, who doesn’t have time to pursue and tolerate the uncertainty that increasingly dogs our pursuit of the truth, to ferret out. This is why populist leaders and their simplistic solutions appeal so broadly. For many people, perhaps a majority, anything, no matter how unfair or preposterous or brutal, can seem preferable to uncertainty. All one can say is that care is needed. Patience is needed. Ability to read and discern mere opinion from that which is based on real evidence, is needed. And a healthy skepticism about information coming from authoritarians who “make their own reality” is desperately needed. Though actual attention to those recommendations may seem unlikely, they may be all we have. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Some Thoughts on Anger

A Zoom group I’m in had a discussion about anger recently, and it brought up some thoughts for me. They began with the notion that not all anger is alike, or equally damaging, and may in some cases be preferable to the alternatives—especially suppression. In my experience, to be specific, with a real father and a stepfather, parental anger was handled in two very different ways. My real father, born in Italy, had a rather volatile temper. He got mad (that’s what we used to call it, never “anger” which would have seemed unnaturally formal for us) regularly, and expressed it freely with choice Italian curse words. He also got mad at us children, sometimes gave us a swat for misbehaving (though it was usually my mother who administered physical punishment), and then could often not help laughing about the whole thing shortly after. In short, the swat ended the trouble and the punishment, and that was it. 

            My stepfather, whom my mother married after my father died, was fully American, of French-Canadian descent. He typified suppression. We knew he got “mad” because of the threatening atmosphere he created, but he never expressed it. Never yelled at my brothers or sisters or me, at least not publicly. The same with my mother: he clearly got annoyed at some of what she said or did, but he never expressed it (other than obliquely) in front of others. We learned later that he was pretty hard on her in private, but none of us knew that, except perhaps by inference. What we did know was that she never crossed him, and we assumed it was out of the fear we could feel. Towards the end, she did leave him once, to live with my sisters in a house they had rented, but after a short time went back; he kept pleading that he couldn’t live without her, and that his health was failing. Even though it wasn’t, she yielded, and remained with him until her death from pancreatic cancer. A few years after that, when he had sold their CT house and moved back to Lowell, MA to live with his sister and her husband in a mobile home, the situation in that enclosed pressure cooker produced its bitter end. We read it in the newspapers: the man we had lived with for years had shot and killed his sister and her husband, and then turned the gun on himself as police closed in. I and my older three siblings were stunned. But my younger brother told us he wasn’t surprised at all: “Didn’t you know he always had a .38 caliber pistol in his safe?”  

            So: two fathers, with different styles regarding anger. One expressed it freely, verbally and sometimes with a smack, but that was it. It was over and done with. The other brooded in silence, and laid down an atmosphere of dread that went on and on. And that brooding, that suppression, finally ended with three deaths via his gun. For me, at least, the quick acting out of anger was far preferable to the quiet, brooding suppression of it that always felt as if it could—and finally did—explode. The immediate expression seemed healthier for all concerned, including for the one that gave vent to it. 

            Sigmund Freud, as I recall, had a lot to say about instinct suppression (killing anger being one of these instincts) in Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Civilization, that is, makes the expression of both the sexual instinct and the killing instinct with which all humans are equipped, unacceptable in most societies, and Freud saw that necessary suppression as dangerous. (It should be said here that the expression of rage cannot be lightly dismissed, as Jared Diamond [Guns, Germs and Steel] shows in his examination of primitive cultures, where encounters among males often lead to violent death). Such extreme suppression is toxic in the long run, Freud said, and can lead to blowouts such as wars or other conflicts that can do widespread damage. My stepfather’s case is instructive. More to the point, I years ago met a psychotherapist named Zaslow who had developed a therapy called “rage reduction” meant to treat the suppressed rage Freud wrote about. In Zaslow’s view, the suppression of rage was just as toxic, if not more so, than the suppression of sex which had been given far more attention. To treat this rage, he would encourage its expression in a controlled treatment where the patient was held firmly in the laps of eight or so helpers, so that the patient could give vent to  extreme rage without the risk of harming others or him/herself. I witnessed one or two of these sessions (they could go on for as long as eight hours in order to elicit this rage, which is so deeply repressed), and they seemed helpful. Unfortunately, a few patients did not do so well long after treatment (at least one committed suicide), and the therapy came under such intense criticism it had to be abandoned. But the point remains: the suppression of rage or anger in modern society can lead to deep psychological, physical and societal problems. 

            This brings us to the present. The alarming rise of guns in the hands of so many millions of Americans swiftly comes to mind. But guns themselves are not the real issue here. It is the anger that arises so often in mass culture, and which can, and increasingly does, result in mass gun violence, and more. The recent case of a large Black man pummeling a Chinese woman in the entrance to her New York apartment is a case in point, and it asks the question: what could possibly elicit such monstrous rage?  In my limited view, such outbursts stem largely from one main issue: the feeling on the part of most individuals that they cannot control their environment or their lives (in some cases leading to the feeling that such a life is hardly worth living). Whether most humans have ever been able to control these things is not obvious, but it certainly seems that it would have been easier to control one’s life circumstances when the group one belonged to was a village or small town where most people were known. Interpersonal problems might be addressed directly with the person or persons involved; larger problems with a local priest or local official or council. In mass culture, of course, this is no longer an option. We are forced, most often, to deal with entities that are remote, and impersonal, and often mechanical. We dial a number to solve a problem, and we get a machine-answering system. The “person,” driven by an algorithm impervious to our frustrations or our specific human needs, mindlessly goes through the options available; and if those options do not fit our situation, we are left with the ridiculous option of screaming at a machine. And even if we finally succeed in reaching a real person, the ones we get to speak to are often just as mechanical. We are left with anger and rage that literally have no outlet. So we smash the phone or kick the dog. 

In short, the whole modern world, which turns most of us into non-entities forced to deal with robots, contributes greatly to the frustration and anger we are left with (which is not to say that no other causes or incitements to anger exist. The constant need of humans to assert dominance, and the reaction to it, is certainly one.) Our lives seem increasingly meaningless in the greater realm of things, where we seem helpless to affect the majority of our world. And it now seems clear that this frustration with having no control, with being non-entities, has led in recent years to more and more Americans (and people world-wide) opting for authoritarian alternatives like Donald Trump to, if nothing else, shake up or thumb a nose at those in charge. The dangers in this case need not be enumerated. 

            And what do our helpers, psychological or spiritual, offer? Reason. Patience. We are advised to either take nonviolent action, such as writing letters to our representatives, or, more generally, consider the person(s) we are angry with, and try to have compassion for their plight. Or understand that they are not at fault; their passion is. Therefore, we should empathize, and treat them with love. All of which are nice ideals. But how effective are they in dealing with the likes of Vladimir Putin, and his mass murder of Ukrainians? Or Donald Trump and his violence-prone minions? And worse, what if such ideals help only in suppressing our rage? What results if we end up never dealing with them, but pushing them beneath our supposedly wise exterior? Will they fester and grow larger and blow along with us, making us ‘go postal’ eventually?

            I am afraid that, for me at least, there are no good answers to all this. In our wired world, we are not only exposed to more of the troubles in the world, from global horrors (such as Putin’s vicious invasion of Ukraine) to murders in the smallest hamlet, but are also increasingly removed from anything like an effective response or remedy. No places to make such a response. Our letters and posts seeming to fall on deaf ears. Our screams at the TV audible only to us and perhaps our families. Leaving us left only with the personal, self-regarding response. Is there a good way for an individual, that is, assailed constantly in every media forum by all this, and assailed by interpersonal conflict as well, to respond? 

            Perhaps what Zen practice teaches us works best. Take pains to be fully aware of how we are feeling, how our bodies and emotions are reacting, and where in the body and how strongly; and then making the decision not to act upon those powerful feelings. That is to say, pretending that we do not have strong feelings, such as anger, about what is happening in our offices or relationships or in Ukraine, pretending that we don’t have to feel any upset but can adopt feelings of  “calm” and “equanimity,” is only feeding the beast with denial. No, feelings of anger, if they occur, are better admitted, acknowledged as human, and thoroughly examined. What does not need to happen is our acting upon them. That is to say, we can feel anger without expressing that anger physically. We can hold that anger in our awareness, and be aware of each impulse to strike out. But not strike out. Eventually, we can become better aware of what triggers anger in us, see what in us feels out of control (including  whether it really is or should be in our control in the first place), and better able to manage it when it arises. Eventually, too, we may come to see more sides of each situation (including the position of the “other,” who is usually just like us) before it arises. 

            All this, to be sure, takes time, and practice. And we must admit that. We must also admit that, in the short run, instantly giving vent verbally or physically to our anger can seem much more satisfying. But in the end, we can come to see that it truly is not; that the expression of anger, pent up or not, can harm not just others, but ourselves, often leading to a greater inclination to express that anger in more and more violent ways. The spiraling results of which we can easily see, vividly appearing in our own troubled world, every single day. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

 

Perfection

 

I got to thinking about perfection and perfectionism this morning, after a zen zoom meeting in which it came up. The idea is one with which most people are familiar: the desire or felt need to do things perfectly, or, as perfectly as we can. It is usually accompanied by the feeling that we have fallen short of our ideal. This can happen with our performance in any number of activities, such as playing an instrument, or playing a sport, or doing math, or writing an email or essay or book, or giving a talk, or preparing a meal, or cleaning, or driving a car, or fixing a roof, or any of the activities we engage in, ad infinitum.  We are always aiming, though rarely succeeding, at reaching perfection. 

            The question that comes up is why? Why this mania, this desperation to be perfect? 

            The answers, if there are any, are of course complex. First has to be its source—striving to please or get approval from our parents. Nearly all of us would admit that, deep down, the person(s) we’re always eager to please, regardless of the current form they take (teacher, boss, critic, reviewer, the public, posterity, etc.), is our father and/or mother. And of course this makes sense, for if we do not get the approval of the source of our life and well-being—our parent(s)—our very survival could be at risk; and, not incidentally, our sense of worth. This is clearly why “unconditional love” is now considered so important, why so many parents now say, ad nauseam, “love you.” Even so, the message that most of us get, or hear as the message, is conditional: ‘I’ll love you if you do this, and do it well.’ Which means to most of us: ‘get it right, get it perfect as I see it, or you will not only not be loved, you will be unworthy.’ No parent actually says this. But most of us interpret the message in this way—if only subconsciously. ‘If you will do as I say, if you do it perfectly, only then will you get my approval and love; if you do it wrong, you will lack my approval and be abandoned, worthless.’ No wonder we all want to be perfect. 

            In modern America, there is an added condition or two to this drive toward perfection. We in the land of “equality” bear the added burden of having to prove our value, our place, earn our love and sense of worth, in the marketplace. That is to say, in more traditional cultures, where social positions are more or less fixed, average people do not have to prove their worth by “doing;” they are considered worthy regardless of what they do or don’t do, simply by the fact of being human. The Dalai Lama was said to have commented about this lack of a fundamental sense of worth in Americans. While he knew that Tibetans had this as a kind of birthright, Americans he observed did not; Americans somehow felt that they had to earn a fundamental sense of worth. And it’s true: we Americans feel we have to “make something” of ourselves. Then, with either our earnings or fame or possessions or the celebration of our colleagues as proof, we can feel worthy—worthy of any social position to which we might aspire. The drive to perfection gets exacerbated by this. It also gets exacerbated by the related fact that most of us live in highly urbanized settings totally unlike the village cultures from which many of our forebears came. And in those small village cultures, embedded in societies similar to the Tibet of the Dalai Lama, one’s sense of worth derived, similarly, just from being known, and accepted/respected as a human being. As such, one was worthy without having to prove anything, without having to makesomething of oneself. One was worthy and known and loved from the outset—unlike those of us in America, where worth must be proven by our accomplishments.

            There is an added burden that we moderns share. That is the burden of being, almost always, watchers rather than performers. We have TVs and CDs and DVDs and smart phones that display for us, always, the most perfect performances—in sports, in music, in scholarship, in talking even—known. Where in prior cultures, one had to attend a live musical or sports event where the risk of mistakes was always on display, and everyone knew it, we always watch or hear on our devices perfection—performances where errors or blunders are easily edited out. And those doing the performing are, to begin with, the best the world can offer: be it Valentina Lisitsa playing Beethoven, or Tom Brady throwing perfect passes. The standards we measure ourselves by are, therefore, these super performances, rather  than the communal games or singing fests that more often prevailed in previous times, and which we could all join. 

            Everything leads us, compels us, therefore, to try for perfection. And what this naturally leads to is discontent—with ourselves for not achieving the perfection we hope is possible, and with others for embodying, at least from the outside, the perfection we wish were ours. Perhaps the most graphic example of this latter is found in the arena of feminine appearance. Women (and, increasingly, men) are constantly regaled with products and processes meant to enhance their looks in the marketplace of attracting a mate. Along with those products come the images, constantly before all of us, of impossibly slim and perfect models whose appeal is hyped in every forum: in parties and bars and marriages and sporting events and automobile outings and business meetings, all of which are made to seem perfect by the presence of beautiful, perfect people. No wonder so many teenagers are depressed, and so many attempt suicide. Who could possibly measure up? 

            With all this, there is, at the same time, an inner dynamic at work, forming resistance to the actual achievement of perfection—even if it were possible. This involves the phenomenon, widely seen in cultures where evil eye is prevalent, of avoiding perfection as a kind of danger. This is especially dramatic in traditional India, where mothers purposely smear the faces of their babies—especially if they are beautiful—to mar or disguise that beauty. Why? Because in evil eye cultures, the attractive child or possession is always at risk—from envious eyes that either lust after that attractive possession, or wish it to be harmed in some way. It is believed that this envious gaze can result in illness or death. The best way to avoid such dire effects (aside from wearing amulets to ward off the eye) is to cover over the obvious beauty or wealth by minimizing it in public. Avoid talking about one’s success or accomplishments. Minimize one’s wealth. Reduce the beauty of a child with dirt or rags. All in the belief that, if envy can be avoided, one will be safe. I myself experienced the latent effects of this as a boy, growing up in a family that definitely believed in evil eye (malocchio in Italian). When I had to perform in piano recitals, for example, and though I never realized it till I was an adult, there was always the inclination to perform well, yes; but dragging in the opposite direction was the impulse to make some mistakes. In short, to avoid looking too good or playing too well, which subconsciously meant attracting the envy of others and the damage of evil eye, I was impelled to fall well short of the perfection I was always striving for. (see my Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision, [Sanniti: 2008] for more details.)  

            I have the feeling that more people than myself, whether they believe in or even know about evil eye, sabotage what they do in this way. That is, concurrent with our drive for perfection, we have an opposite drive seeking to avoid doing our best. If this seems like a contradiction, it is that confounding contradiction of which human behavior is so often made. 

            Perfection, then. We yearn for it more than anything else. At the same time, we seem to avoid it like the plague. Which brings us to the question: is perfection even possible in this world? And if it were, would we, as mere humans, want it? My guess is that most of us don’t really have to worry about this. Nothing we do, or are, is ever perfect. But what if we could approach it? Would any of us make that storied bargain with the devil, or with science, to achieve perfect health (DNA purged of all genes for disease) or wealth or competence or immortality if it were offered? I think not. Perfection, it seems to me, would take us out of the human realm, where “human” means, if we examine it closely, the arena of mistake, of error. Life itself consists mostly of mistakes. Mistakes, errors, failures are what make us human. Each of us, at some level of our being, knows this. I knew this (albeit not consciously) when performing on the piano. And so, we make mistakes; and so, we constantly fall short of our ideal of perfection; and so, we are at one with the rest of humanity, with the rest of life itself; striving to be perfect, driven to achieve perfection, but always knowing that we cannot get there—not least because perfection would be that ultimate end stop, that isolation that none of us truly wants—if, that is, what we mistaken creatures want matters in the first place. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi