Me Thinks the President Doth Protest too Much

Recently, President Bush held a 40-minute news conference during which he kept repeating, "I care, I really do care." He also said: "Death bothers me." But, of course, our commander-in-chief protests too much.

Listening to Dybya pronounce words that mean caring and compassion is like listening to a student in a Berlitz class recite words of Greek to get ready for a trip to Athens in two weeks. Caring, as a word and as an action, are Greek to him.

No wonder he recently read Camus's "The Stranger." As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd notes in her August 15th column, "Camus Comes to Crawford," the alienated hero Meursault, who didn't know the day his mother died, is a perfect character study for our fearful leader. After all, Meursault is as much a sociopath as Bush, killing an Arab for no reason other than the intense heat and sun of an Algerian afternoon. Bush, too, is caught in the same disconnect from the violence he plans or, at least, approves. I'd like to blame has callousness on the Crawford sun, but these decisions are made indoors, usually in the Ofal Office. In any case, a presidential seal is a presidential seal. And he must be held irresponsible for his acts.

As you can see, George Bush tests a lot of resolves and reserves in me. If this is all one entablature of light, as Sufis believe, then our president is participant in this mystery and must somehow be regarded in terms of that membership. Nevertheless, I think him guilty of daily war crimes and worthy of successful impeachment and imprisonment. And I will forgive him when the body of his acts is a completed sum with no possibility of continuance.

Here's American poet Charles Olson on a real leader. Call him Christ. Call him Martin Luther King: the life is the same--and so is the fate. Earlier in this poem, Olson decribes the hero as "eucharistically present," but not to be eaten or devoured--only listened to and learned from and emulated. That never seems to happen. So spend another pre-Sabbath Friday afternoon at a lynching and later love the dude for escaping the fate of being forgotten. Christ didn't need to be swaddled in the butchery-followed-by-resurrection myth. But the church imprisoned him in that time-worn template. So we got ourselves a fisher-king, or whatever they designate the returned one.

I strand you in the middle of this poem where Olson describes the mission of the hero up to the moment he sees his face in the falling axe. Watch what happens. A couple of miles upstream, the hero is already back at work, this time with a receptive audience. Meanwhile, the disciples of the slain hero are brandishing canes and handing out permanent Cain marks to the lynch mob. It's an incredible poem. By the way, note how our hero, like Meursault and Bush, braves the sun but nevers for a moment thinks of pulling the trigger.

Why they are, and he not loving anything but
his own life, that generousness, that he give
with no expectation of anything back--he,
up to then, often, in the glaring sun had sat
singing out his love, nor found
tranquility to ease his yearning, always
sleepless cares within his soul wore him
the while he looked for woman's rosy countenance. Instead,
such as these crowded around
and in foul odor and with loud whetted axes

He moved up, out of the shadows
of the lower river, past the white sand,
up ten miles where the water had cut the most
down through the rock, and bottom land,
ten feet off the stream bed, grew peach trees
which glowed from the sun which fell down the sides
of the pinnacle--there, he sang such songs women,
in whose cheeks men's risks raised color,
listened

while back where he had been his fellows
branded those others that they, disfigured,
would never forget their deed
of hate

--Charles Olson, "The Leader," from The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, University of California Press, 1997

Even Satan Listens to Bodhisattvas

I watched Spike Lee's harrowing documentary on Katrina, which places this momentous tragedy in the proper social and political contexts.

So much was lost in that storm--a lot of it having to do with compassion and mercy, the two most cardinal qualities of God that are his greatest proofs. From a practical, practising standpoint of meditation- and prayer-based mindfulness, God can only exist (that is, be cognized) in the expression of His virtues. When Sufis like myself invoke God's mercy and compassion before any action, deed or event, we do so because this is activation of the Christ within, or what Buddhists calls "orignal mind," or Sufis the "nur [light of] Muhammed." For me, the residuum of God is what my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen calls "Allah's 3,000 gracious qualities." And as Confucius kept pointing out, the continuous articulation of those qualities is what makes leaders true leaders.

Alas, that articulation has been almost completely eradicated from public life in America, and people like me who see it as the largest casualty of Katrina are grieving for it this morning. America has been plunged into an evil emptiness--not an emptiness of surrender or relinquishment that are often preludes to bonding and sharing, but a state of still-born consciousness that rises no higher on the chakra chain than maybe the gut. Welcome to the I-me-mine world and world-view. Don't you miss the world of Oneness?

Speaking of Oneness, let me interrupt this text message for the following anecdote: Last night a friend Lou Buetler asked me, "What are your two choices after death?" I answered, "Heaven or Hell." He then said, "If you choose Heaven you choose Hell because in heaven you are still separate from God. The only choice in any life is God, oneness with God." Now that's practising Sufism, which, as you can readily see, is just the Muslim study of non-duality. Now back to my post-Katrina thought-stream:

What, I keep asking myself, will act as countervalence to the vicious vacancy of true virtue in public life, including government? I could say prayer, but some of the most parched spirits in Washington hold daily prayer meetings and look at pictures of the Last Supper with moist-eyed earnestness.

So piety has failed and we must seek, as some Buddhists suggest, a non-pietistic, non-preachy way to restoration of virtue. That several million American believers subscribe to the notion of a kick-ass god who is planning a collective punishment of unrepentant humanity is probably the best evidence we have of the failure of pietistic scripture-based religion. The world is drowning in self-righteousness--Holocaust-addicted Jews who bomb or keep captive their neighbors and justify it as self-defense, couch potato Christians who watch CNN for signs of a crusty Christ's warring presence (sometimes mistaken, according to creationist science, for global warming) and vindictive Muslims who think God rejoices at their self-detonation inside an Israeli Starbucks or in front of a Tel Aviv Gap.

I offer this soothing scene from Wendell Berry's masterpiece, "Jayber Crow," dealing with a Kentucky Katrina called the 1937 Louisville Flood. Our hero Jayber Crow has just left a seminary because he and organized religion don't match up too well and is searching for a new homestead. On his way to discovering his new home in Port William, Kentucky, the fictional locale of all Berry's novels, Jayber is caught in a flood. After trying unsuccessfully to cross a bridge that is in danger of being swept away (this scene is my favorite in all literature, equal in my esteem to the Grand Inquisitor scene in "The Brothers Karamazov" which topped my list of great literary moments for decades), the hero must take shelter in a government building that has been suitably, fully converted into a hospice. The comfort and goodness he receives here give him the strength to resume his journey homeward the next day.

Until Katrina's survivors know a public comforting, and norms of compassion such as Jayber receives, this country will remain without any moorings in mercy, stranded in meaningless , fatal wealth that is robbed of its final, sanctifying resonances of well-being and charity (and please don't trot out the Marshall Plan; we've been living on that laurel too long). I mourn the loss of our country and take refuge in my teacher's constant assurance that God hears our prayers but has already given all the answers in that glorious bestowal called Creation. As long as the major human arteries of His mercy and conduits of His compassion are clogged and hardened with fear and greed, we suffer the illusion God does not love us or is punishing us or does not exist. I believe Job #1 is to unlock the light within; but I hasten to warn that it only becomes visible in its transmutation from heat to illumination, fire to radiance. In other words, as engaged Bahais, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, deisits, and atheists, we praise God most through service to others. "Make the hunger of others your own," Bawa urged thousands of times. That acceptance is what is missing from the Katrina story and its aftermath.

Another aside: The same Republicans who built those useless, overpriced Patriot Missiles built those ramshackle FEMA trailers. Spike Lee took us on a guided tour of one. During his penance in purgatory, George Bush will have to live in a FEMA trailer for a kalpa or two. Hey, it could be worse. As part of its new Madison Avenue makeover and Coke-vs-Pepsi battle with Heaven, Hell, like Wal-Mart, is now offering organic produce. The idea came from a pesty Bodhisattva, who immolated himself on a Saigon street corner in his last life, and has been stationed ever since in Hell refusing to leave until every soul is set free. As for beef, George's freezer will be stocked with meat substitutes made by Christian brotherhoods who think the taking of life is prohibited anywhere, including Hell, in the next world. As Satan is fond of saying, "What makes Hell a hell is your attitude. We truly care about the welfare of our residents. Boca Burgers beat beef patties any day (is than an endorsement?)."

Please take temporary refuge in Wendell's words. They'll help a lot, I promise.

"And then gradually it came clear to me that we weren't just a helpless, aimless mob of strays, but people were there who were in charge of us--people setting up cots, moving about, asking if anybody was sick, or hurt, giving help where it was needed. And then it came to me that I was smelling food. I looked around a little and saw that several smiling ladies were handing out bowls of soup and pieces of bread.

As I knew I wasn't exactly in the same fix as the other people, I didn't go to the table in any kind of rush but waited until I could go without getting in front of anybody. Especially I didn't want to push in ahead of any of the children. But when the way got clear, I went. I got my bowl and my spoon and my piece of bread and leaned back against the wall. I stuck my nose into the steam rising off of that hot soup and let my heart rejoice.

Pretty soon people began putting their children to bed. And the grown-ups who had no children were finding places for themselves. I didn't take one of the cots, but found a little nook behind a statue of a man of another time and folded up my raincoat for a pillow and lay down on the floor with my back to the crowd and my box [of belongings] between me and the wall.

I was thoroughly tired, and I didn't exactly lie awake, but I didn't exactly sleep either. As soon as I shut my eyes I could see the river again, only now I seemed to see it up and down its whole length. Where just a little while before people had been breathing and eating and going about in their eveyday lives, now I could see currents come riding in, at first picking up straws and dead leaves and little sticks, and then boards and pieces of firewood and whole logs, and then maybe the henhouse or the barn or the house itself. As if the mountains had melted and were flowing to the sea, the water rose and filled all the airy spaces of rooms and stalls and fields and woods, carrying away everything that would float, casting up the people and scattering them, scattering or drowning their animals and poultry flocks. The whole world, it seemed, was cast adrift, riding the currents, whirled about in eddies, the old life submerged and gone, the new not yet come.

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a mudy horse, and letting the pieces fly. I had almost no sooner broke my leash that I had hit the wall."

--Wendell Berry, "Jayber Crow," Counterpoint Press, 2000, pages 82-3.

Beatitudes of Desolation

The young must cry out with the old that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon are immoral and must end. Only then will beer mug, whiskey glass and Starbucks paper cup alike be alchemized by stern occasion into grails. These are the only cups with Christ's blood in it, our blood metabolized into His blood by sheer intensity of disgust with war and yearning for peace.

Alas, there is no one to hand the cup to or to beg a swig from. The cup is not empty. It has disappeared. Meaning, in a Keatsian way of reality through absence, it was the grail--one of millions conjured from Cracker Jack boxes when our dreams were moist as dew and sheer magic. Alas, there is no one to inherit my disgust with the order of things, no one to sanctify and salvage despair with dreams of a better world won by marching in the streets.

O how I miss the sense that our youth mattered, as so nobly expressed in the following John Wieners poem written in the midst of American summers overheated by hatred of war not bald spots dotting the ozone layer.

Jesse, Bajir, Raheem, Max, I beg of you non-ironic, fervid disgust with the order of things. I beg you to plot rescues of this still-young century and, as John Wieners says, "to plunder your patriotism."

What follows is a bouquet of imperishable flowers left to wither in the empty streets. I'm gathering them for you. Please believe me when I say they will grow if you just take them.

Love,David

BEATITUDES OF DESOLATION

Einstein on war:"This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

A Call to Arms by John Wieners:

YES, YOUTH ARE MARCHING ON AGAINST THE WORLD
Yes, youth are marching on against the world
As some have always, opposing injustice and oppression
Youth are marching on against this world
Climbing dun hills to challenge city police and authority

Revolution's spies menace each place to carry banners of
independence upon their bodies,
Protest tonight on boulevards in Washington and Chicago
Blocking doorways, not buying cheap goods off wealth nor its education

Youth print newspapers and seize control of national music
Plunge fear into hearts of waspist executives or world leaders
without mercy
Grab up whores of the family and diplomacy counting no cost
To send out new world memos of liberties for the damned and drugged

Youth march on against the world, in church and holler on farm,
through small town
Not one is spared, black eyes of poets burn across wooden tables
in poverty
With each sharp, loud sound, one thinks our revolution's come!
Rebellion slinks into an unsuspecting heart; with each siren
one believes
Some are caught, trapped, though most remain free to plot,
to plan, to plunder his patriotism.

from: "Uncollected Poems 1958-1975"

An Open Letter to U.N. Owen and His Ilk

Dear U.N.,

I wrote the following fairly polite letter as a comment to post at your site but I'm not allowed to leave it unless I join your club. And I have no intention of doing so--mainly because you're just one of a number of Internet vigilantes who think they are upholding the violated rights of artists and savants. Well, like the oft-posted song says, "Something is happening / and you don't know what it is / do you Mr Owen?" Hey, you're not alone. Neither does the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court. Anyway, here's what I want to say to you--mind you, politely, not in the surly,self-righteous tone you usually use--and others who are trying to destroy the greatest cultural underground the world has ever known:


I'm the guy who posted the Kenneth Rexroth poem about Sacco & Vanzetti at my blog (http://www.bestlittleblog.com). This is an act you called piracy.

Just for the record, poems are meant to be read and it is within my rights to post them as rallying cries to others (as long as the author receives full credit which they always do).

The goal of my blog is to introduce my son's generation to the glories of post-war American poetry and writing. That often involves exegesis or anecdote--and some kind of commentary on my part (which everyone is free to skip). I do not see this as infringment on the rights of these authors (most of whom are dead) because: 1) they are used to, and have often condoned, the free distribution of their poems in the service of a cause [mine is cultural literacy] and 2) they would be proud to see their poems used as exemplars and illustrations of great writing.

In other words, I see my blog as a classroom where the subject is modern American literature and these poems are handouts. My fervent hope is that seeing one of these treasures will deflect someone into a library or book store to find more. Who knows? Maybe they will google the writer's name and discover gold. If enough people start inquiring about Ed Dorn, his collected poems (out of print since the late 1970s) might be reissued.

The crime here isn't in my sharing these poems (for no personal gain) but your attempts to blocade this effort. The world is starving for the songs that people like me are posting. The Internet is a cultural and political lifeboat. Stop trying to torpedo it.

Regards,

David Federman