I heart monks

I’ve know of Wat Nagara Dhamma from about the time I moved to San Francisco in ’98, to attend graduate school at CIIS. The first few months, while living over at Stanyan and Fulton (I’ll write about that hellish pit some other time), found me in shock, literally having panic attacks of some level every day. After that, after moving to the Moraga St. house, there was less housing stress, and I’d begun to settle into school after 8 years of being un-schooled. My head clarified a bit, and I began to look around me. Some web site at the time listed Buddhist centers in town, and this one was pretty much down the street from my house, and though my roots are in Goenka's vipassana tradition, I still feel great fondness for the Theravadan monastics, those who hosted me at Suan Mokkh (Thailand) for my first deep exposure to meditation. But I never went to visit. There's a whole story there about my avoidance of organized communities which I'll also take up some other time. Here I just want to gush about monks.

I loved visiting the monks the other day. The reason for going was to complete one of the goals on my list for my private practice. I've joined up with a colleague in New York to "spot" each other in our marketing efforts, and it was getting close to the time where we were to report in on our work. I tried to call the temple, but the fellow who answered could barely speak English, and finally hung up on me, seemingly thinking I had finished my business. So I showed up at their door step the next morning, at a converted house on Lincoln across from GG Park. It's curious that I'd driven past it numerous times over the years and, even when looking for it, not been able to see where it was. They may have put up a more obvious sign recently. But I found it, and as I approached, an older monk in traditional golden robes got out of a car and entered the temple. I knocked and the older fellow answered, and when he heard me speaking English, motioned for a younger monk to come attend to me. We introduced ourselves, and I told them that I'd lived in the neighborhood for years, and was just now coming to visit. The converted basement room was part shrine room, part storage space, part coffee/tea bar, with what seemed to be an office in a room at the back. The monk invited me upstairs, which was the temple proper, with the cascade of statues and flowers against one wall, and open space for sitting.

We chatted about the temple and how long he'd been in San Francisco (two years, before which he was in Thailand), what happens at the temple (services at 6am and 6pm, mostly chanting and dhamma lecture), and what I do (I translated "psychotherapy" as "helping people with suffering," though that didn't seem to register much). The conversation was warm if stilted, and the monk had that same humility and lightness that I've experienced in most of his brethren. I know there's plenty of shadow for monastics to recon with; I remember watching a monk in Bangkok stop at a street stand and buy cigarettes and a Red Bull. But there's generally an orientation that makes encounter with them different from, say, a car salesman. They've dedicated their lives to their own and others enlightenment, to the end of suffering, and it makes how they move in the world much different then the rest of us.

For instance, when we had talked for fifteen minutes or so, we went back downstairs where the other monks were beginning lunch. My host offered me some tea, and made it know that he was going to join in the lunch. I sat on a couch next to the tea table and sipped my Lipton black tea and soaked in the quiet atmosphere, noticing that my mind was more at rest than usual. They simply ate, not fussing with me, a desert welcome that I so much more prefer to a gushing Mediterranean hug. The sense of spaciousness and flexibility of movement is so important to me in relationships: it allows both play and contemplation, and for me, a deeper sense of contact and communion. It's what I've felt at all the monasteries I've been to or stayed at, from Thailand to India to California. I suppose one could experience monk welcomes as cold or stand-offish, perhaps intimidating in its spaciousness. For me, some part inside relaxes in a way I still don't understand, but it's what I experienced at this temple and it touched me deeply.

Night Sweats of the Bourgeois

Last weekend I watched Requiem for a Dream, having gotten on a kick with Darren Aronofsky's work (which includes Pi, and The Fountain), and whoa, boy, was it a punchy film. In the past, this is a film I would have sneered at for being what I might have termed, "conveniently bleak," for being...tragedy. I still have little use for that form of art, as most of the time you get a thin cypher for author's own particular pain, but written large and definitive. The dark adolescent drama still makes me sigh.

But this movie was different. It struck me as a pretty true depiction or representation of the hell state, in this case in the form of addiction to heroine. Aronovsky and Selby (the writer of the novel and co-screen writer) give us the image, but without saying that that's all there is in the world, that all endeavors turn to shit and all dreams lead to the flames. These are four particular stories that are given, four inflections of the same hell, but there are others in the film who are not either in or heading for that place. Nor does it seal the characters up in their suffering, denying them of some eventual redemption or salvation. It simply takes us from the anteroom of hell to it's deep interiors, and leaves us there. Ok, I can accept that. And having had some experiences of feeling utterly trapped, I can feel the truthfulness of the depictions.

The next morning, though, I realized that it wasn't a film to watch right before going to bed. I woke with a screeching anxiety and sense of despair that didn't match up to anything going on in my life. After meditating for several hours, I think I understood what about the film crawled under my skin and opened up an abscess.

I grew up in a pretty conventional household, lower and then middle middle class, tutored by my family and environs (the term "community" is much too strong for my suburban neighborhoods) in a certain imago of the world, that with it's sixties overtones and colorings, was basically the classic bourgeois lens. Money and wealth were not ostensibly the uber-goals, but under the surface they were what defined safety and security. The neighborhoods we lived in were generally solid middle class, older track houses generally owned by your standard workers or small business owners. Money as status was not obvious; everyone was more or less at the same level economically, and outward appearances were not really stressed.

But there seemed to be a chronic underlying anxiety about money, in my family and in my neighborhoods. Our family was scaping-by-poor at the beginning, as my parents were beginning to establish themselves in their work, and later became more financially stable. But there were little in the way of safety nets, either from other family or socially. We would never have starved, but with the whole extended family living at the same level, there was not a sense of being able to fall back in any substantive way on other family members. The stress, from what I remember, was intense at times, both because there was real financial struggle, and because of how my parents were trained up to think about money.

I can remember my father going from job to job, either getting fired or quitting, till landing a position with a pest control company (where he still works). He and mom would fight about it, in the back room behind a closed but thin door, so we knew as kids that the ground under us was not stable. We also, in family stories, and in the popular media we were exposed to, taught about what was below us, what pit it was possible to fall into if we did not work hard enough or strayed too far out of the mainstream. The bums down on K St., the hookers on T St., the druggies and gangsters somewhere down in then unvisited depths of South Sacramento, all were object lessons in what happens to you if you fall. From relatively civilized to living with the animals, fighting for bones and carrion.

Waking up the morning after Requiem was waking up into a terror of regression, what seems to me to be the night sweats of the bourgeois. Requiem follows the descent of four mostly middle class people as their social relationships and financial status crumble. Under the stress of addiction and impoverishment (the three addicts), and loneliness and despair (the mother), their families atomize and their access to resources dries up. They become gaping mouths without the ability to feed themselves. They become powerless and helpless, falling on the tender mercies of the state, which in the bourgeois mind, is good for the underclass, and appropriate punishment for the failings that their poverty demonstrates. But for the middle class, having climbed out of that fetid state, regression back to it is utter hell, truly terrifying, the funneling of anxieties around loss of a tenuous power, and recognition that the animal skills that are transmuted in being civilized, are no longer available when you lose your wings and fall back to the jungle floor.

That was a rough morning.

Patrons of the Arts

One of the best things we've ever bought, James and I decided, are memberships to the De Young Museum. For $80 a year (or so, since mine doesn't seem to want to expire), you get free, unlimited entry to all exhibits at the De Young and Legion of Honor. And since Heather and I have about an hour attention span for the museum, after which we get that traveler's glaze that you see on people down at Pier 39, it makes museum visiting actually attractive. So we get to walk over any time, through the park and to the museum, stay as long as we like, and know we don't have to take in the whole buffet because we only paid once. James and I went the other day just to see Thiebaud's Gumballs, which this picture here cannot really represent. It's a stunning image when you're standing in front of it, with deep grooves in the paint, very subtle gradations of color and huge brush strokes. I've fallen in love with his paintings since seeing his San Francisco city scapes on first entering the rebuild De Young, and am still impressed and captivated by his work.

The membership also gives you opportunity to attend special "members only" events, like the opening of the Claude Lorrain exhibit a few months ago. That was a sweet evening, getting to play Patrons in slight dress up garb, in a museum that was about a quarter full of the usual crowds. There was a jazz band of old cusses rocking out just outside the exhibit space, and later I showed James the room at the very end of the museum, which I stumbled on after missing, by a day, the ending of the Monet show. We got to stand a hand's width away from a couple Monet paintings, and a Picasso work and sculpture. Totally alone in the room with these greats.

Then today we made a morning date to have breakfast over here--oatmeal, nuts, and "hemp hearts," imported hemp seeds from Canada, where, apparently, they have sane drug laws--then walked over on a gorgeous clear day to visit the Ruth Asawa exhibit (we'd seen and thoroughly interpreted the California Impressionists some time ago).

What a magnificent building! (Some architects got a stack of good karma from designing this place, and, in heaven, will be sipping wine from the cleavage of nymphs while their glass-box colleagues, in hell, are giving rat-juice enemas to Satan.) Everything about it works: the exquisite openness of the main foyer, the increasingly subtle patina on the copper facades, the surprising touches you find after a dozen visits (for me, today, it was the wall of fragmented reflections you see when descending the stairs to the basement). And best of all, it's a public building and only there in order to serve the public good. They did this one completely right, in my view. Of course there are other opinions. Heather thinks it's a bit shy of a copper plated turd. Well, we can't all be connoisseurs.

The Asawa exhibit was something I would not have paid for, frankly, not because it wasn't well done--it was, as virtually all of the De Young's exhibits have been so far. But because it's not, on the face of it, my cup of tea. There is a "coolness" throughout her work represented there, which didn't dawn on me until I had the association to a particular branch of one of her bent wire pieces, of a couple of arms and hands outstretched in joy. My emotional reaction made me realize that with the previous pieces, I hadn't experienced anything like an emotional stirring. Overtly, the artist is not really working with emotion. Someone like Monet, you'd have to have been recently lobotomized not to have some kind of emotional hit; but Asawa seems not only uninterested, but unaware of emotion within the context of her art. These pieces seem to fall in the realm of "studies," what happens when the artist simply looks and reproduces, without filtering the seen through their own persona or biases. Ostensibly, because in the accompanying video documentary of her work, that's how she described her work, as a parent standing in the background while the child takes center stage. That is her contention.

To my eye, though, her work seems that of a very focused child. Which is not to say it is childish, or that I'm condemning it. But it has a curious lack of self-consciousness that in this post-modern age, struck me as antiquated and overly simple. I could imagine work along similar lines coming across as more pure, but Asawa's struck me as a bit naive about the role of perspective in art, especially the way art does not have a privileged perspective, a standpoint which has an superior claim to authority. (Not that I'd go so far as claiming that all interpretations are equally valid--in fact, I find such a stance about as appealing as the aforementioned rat-juice enemas, because it conflates absolute value with relative value, and arrogates to itself a narcissistic authority that's the adult version of, "cause I wanna!")
The idea that she was simply channeling what she saw in the organic lines and curves of her garden is, as James unequivocally put it, "So false." It's curiously pre-Freudian, lacking an awareness of the unconscious and how behavior and belief are impossibly multi-determined. I had a strange vertigo looking at her work, as when James and I traced the wire embroidery sculpture's surface, as it became the inside and outside of itself a number of times. It struck us as both as incredibly simple and amazingly ostentatious. My word was "wacky." The coolness of the forms and material--usually steel or copper wire--sets off against what James noted as its self-indulgence. Yet there's no visible indication of the artist's awareness of this tension or juxtaposition. Again, it feels distinctly pre-Freudian.

But the experience itself--this is why I love having the museum so accessible. I had to struggle to find a relationship with Asawa and her work, and that was a good workout for me. My own tendency to sum up and move on was challenged, and the complexities of the work and its context, once James and I began parsing them, was enlivening. Even if the work is not particularly evocative, a Monet-level experience as it were, the process of coming to terms with the work faces me with certain of my own biases and weaknesses. I get to see the places that I'm trying to reject in myself, and since I see my work these days very much in Wilberian terms, basically, of not rejecting anything, not splitting myself off from anything, I get to go a little further in expanding my sense of self. It's the opposite of my English literature days, of the endeavor to either dominate or reject art. Instead of reinforcing judgementalism, this process at the De Young cracks me open a bit and lets a little more air in.