Adventures in Multiplicity

Soto Zen by Keido Chisan

2011-11-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

From September 14 to October 12 I co-led a class on Soto Zen: An Introduction to the Thought of the Serene Reflection Meditation School of Buddhism by Keido Chisan Koho Zenji at my Zen Center.

My co-teacher, Daicho, was able to give biographical information on Keido Chisan from a biography only available in Japanese. The audio from the first class on this and the first chapter can be found here. Thinking of our class series, Daicho shared his thoughts on why Keido Chisan felt so driven to bring Soto Zen to the West, and to the United States in particular, and shared details from Keido Chisan's life that supported this.

More recently, Zen Center member Unkai published her paper on Keido Chison in the newsletter, found here. She concentrates more on Keido Chisan's younger years.

Unfortunately, the 2nd class on September 21 did not record correctly...nor did the 4th class...and I thought these were our most successful classes as discussions go. (This happens because there is no way to double-check in real time that the recording is actually happening, they tell me.)

Chapter 2 really started to make sense to me when I realized I could express it in a diagram. It was interesting to us that while the three foundational concepts of Buddhism that we usually talk about are anicca, anatta, and dukkha, in this case Koho Zenji talked about anicca, anatta, and karma (without naming them as such, but using English definitions for the "laws"). Altogether, these three laws allow what we think of as the self, always changing. If I remember right, during class someone asked me where I thought dukkha (life is marked by dissatisfaction) fit. I responded that dukkha flavors the whole thing. The more one is subject to dukkha, and the clinging to the self being a certain way, the more separate from all beings, the more solidified the flawed self is, and the more unaware one would be of the middle of the triangle.

One of our monks pointed out that the inside of the triangle reflects the transcendent experience. This pleased me, as I am tickled when something I create fits together even better than I originally conceived.

This diagram represents these statements by Koho Zenji in Chapter 2:

In Mahayana Buddhism we combine these three signs and say that they are but the One Sign which reveals the True Nature of all things. When we view the nature of things with the eyes of enlightenment, we see that all things are manifestations of Truth.

The law that all things are impermanent, based on the doctrines of causation and no-soul, ultimately developed into the concept of ku expounded in the Scriptures of Great Wisdom.

The law of causation, aided by the laws of impermanence and no-soul, was gradually deepened and led to the doctrine of phenomenal identity of the Kegon Kyo. Phenomenal identity is the name given to the idea that all phenomena have a deep, inseparable interrelation. Everything is related in both time and space to everything else, forming an inseparable whole, yet functioning freely.

The law of the non-existence of the soul, supported by the laws of causation and impermanence, led to the development of the idea of the Buddha Nature. The Buddha Nature is the essence of the Buddha. It is That which makes him Buddha.

Think about how radical this is, this Buddhism in the West. No soul, no God, no separable identity.

For the 3rd class on September 28, we discussed Chapters 3, 4, and 5, audio found here.

For the 4th class on October 5, we planned to discuss Chapters 6 and 7, but only got through Chapter 6. We discussed sectarianism, and what the good and the harm could be. We asked the question, "Why do we practice?" considering Dogen's teaching that training and enlightenment are the same, and Koho Zenji's statement, "Just-sitting based on faith is the fullest form of enlightenment." We also asked what people thought their Buddha Nature is, keeping in mind that as soon as we try to put words to it we would fall short. We wanted to have fun with that, though with many newbies in the class, many thought they couldn't express this. Mine, for example, is sparkly. Ebullient. In my younger years I did not have access to this consciously.

Koho Zenji says of Keizan, who is said to be the compassionate mother of Soto Zen, and who brought us our ceremonies,

We must enable them to know the joy that comes from a knowledge of the Dharma and the bliss that comes from the practice of meditation. It is absolutely essential to have a personal character like that of Great Master Keizan in order to carry out this mission. To regard all people with warm affection, to become the friend of the common people, to enter the realm of the ideal together with them and to share one's joy with others. These are the characteristics of the true man of religion.

We asked people to share this joy and bliss that came from their experience in a ceremony. This particularly would have been nice to have captured in the audio.

Finally, the 5th class on October 12 can be found here.

Fat Karma: Recovery from the Diet Paradigm

2011-10-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

My home altar, Prajnaparamita, Peace, and me

This would be as good a time as any to resurrect my Fat Karma series. This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival. To see if I have covered this topic before, I skimmed over those posts and others with a related label, and found this phrase of mine, "recovery from the diet paradigm." I think it's my own phrase...maybe I picked it up somewhere. It's certainly how I've been thinking about this for many years.

I have said before that I had a consciousness of diet by the age of six. I would not be surprised if this is the norm, that a child is likely to be aware of good and bad foods, calories, the need not to be fat, and the word 'diet'. The child unhindered by this consciousness is most likely the exception. The histrionics of this eating disordered society has become even worse in the decades since my own childhood.

I grew to be a teen who could not believe she was beautiful, sexy, pretty, because she'd always received the message that she weighed too much to be any of these things. This affected my sex life in college. Even if given messages that I was sexy, I couldn't quite believe it. Even though I'd never thought I'd be the marrying type, I settled with one guy and did marry him, because though I wasn't quite conscious of the reason, deep down I was afraid no one else would have me, so I loved the one I was with.

I didn't know it at the time, but the day I started practicing meditation was the day I would begin to love my body. It would take a few years before I could get a glimpse of this, and several more years before I could believe, and even more before I could consistently act from a place of loving myself, my whole self, including my body, and my big belly.

A defining moment: post-college, in my twenties, with my first husband here in Portland. I sat down with a plate-full of rice and beans (I'd been a vegetarian since twenty-one). My husband worried that I would keep getting fatter. I don't remember precisely what he said, what he started yelling, but I remember the certainty in my response. I told him that what I was doing, my Buddhist practice, was the right thing for me, and would help me with this issue. That being fat or overeating was not the problem, it was the symptom. I knew that meditation gave me access to myself, and that my friends at the Zen Center, who were my mirrors, and my teacher, would continue to help me access myself, and get to the root of the problem.

I still spoke with the language of the diet paradigm, but this was a first step to recovery. I knew something had happened with meditation: I could no longer diet. I trusted this practice, though, as from the very beginning it gave me access to something I hadn't had before...my own inner voice.

Now I realize I could no longer diet because what you must do in order to diet is ignore the signals coming from your body. You mustn't eat when you're hungry, but you must eat only certain things, certain amounts, and at certain times. You mustn't eat for pleasure, for good taste, but for minimum sustenance and lowest calories, no matter what your insides, your mouth, your eyes, your nose tells you. To do this, you must separate from the pain, from the hunger, from the body. Meditation put me back in my body; ignoring my body's voice was no longer an option. I now know this is a central message of Health at Every Size, that if we listen to our body's signals, eat what satisfies our true hunger, we will be unlikely to be subject to the cycle of deprivation and binging that results from dieting and food restriction. No food is good or bad. No food is forbidden (unless you're allergic). Food that is appreciated is food that satisfies. In my experience, I then need less of it.

Included with my meditation practice during these years was a recurring vow to Pay Attention. As part of this, I noticed that even though I worked on my feet eight hours a day, walked to and from work for a total of more than an hour, was a vegetarian, I did not lose weight. I noticed during meditation retreats when we shared meals, it did not matter the size of people, but some people ate more than me, and some people ate less than me. While we are to set aside comparing mind during a retreat, in this mode of paying attention I began to get the message that I actually ate normally.

Also during this time I took a temporary vow not to eat chips or chocolate. This three month period taught me the ways I could squirm around a limit (I ate non-chocolate candy), but the larger lesson was learned after the vow was over. I am so grateful for this tradition at my temple, the temporary vow to intensify one's practice. I might have benefited from a Catholic upbringing. When it was over, I made the return to chocolate and chips a special occasion. While I'd mindfully abstained, after, I mindfully ate, and I found an incredible gift. I truly enjoyed that chocolate, those chips, and I realized before this vow, I'd never truly eaten them. Previously, while I ate, I also ate the guilt, and the shame, and the belief that I shouldn't really be eating them. I realized this not-eating happened with all food I ate. I would never not-eat when I ate again.

When I could be grateful, and love the food I put in my body, I could truly begin to make choices that nourished my whole self. I could truly begin to choose foods out of love for my body, including my body's health and my body's pleasure.

A very similar thing went on with my view of my body. I couldn't just look at my body. I could only see parts of it at a time. I couldn't like certain parts of my body. I couldn't include these as parts of me. Again, with this recurring vow of Pay Attention, I heard it when my inner voice said, "I could be bisexual." I began to notice, and cultivate an awareness of those aspects of a woman I found attractive. I noticed that I could like a generously curved woman, appreciate the parts much like the parts of myself I couldn't look at, and I would realize, if she shared parts just like mine, and I liked how she looked, why couldn't I like how I looked? I learned to lose the warped vision that comes from an eating-disordered society.

Through this process, I finally reached a point where I could believe it when a man, or a woman, told me I looked sexy. When I am truly in my body, enjoying the ways it can feel, it can move, I am loving my body, and that is sexy.

Once I gave up this language about myself, this hateful self-talk that is the diet paradigm, and I made every effort to notice it, root it out, and change the habit of self-degradation, I noticed how many people disparage themselves with it, no matter what size they are. It's insidious, how much it is part of our culture.

Eastern Oregon Trip: Thomas Condon Paleontology Center

2011-10-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

View of Sheep Rock from the parking lot of the Paleontology Center

It was while we were in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument that we left HWY 26 and turned north on Oregon HWY 19.

I was excited to visit the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, two miles after our turnoff. I was reading Your Inner Fish for my library book group. I find the fossil record fascinating. When I was a kid I had a small fossil collection, several of which were found in my rural Wisconsin back yard. (I have to ask my mom if that's still around.)

In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Fossils were the big thing among a certain set. A minister and self-taught scientist in The Dalles, Oregon, Thomas Condon, heard about abundant fossils from soldiers in 1862, and in 1865 he began excavating fossils in this area. Condon eventually became a Professor of Geology at the University of Oregon.

A few minutes after arriving at the center, a short movie about the John Day Fossil Beds and paleontology was announced. We learned there are fossil beds throughout 10,000 square miles of Eastern Oregon. The National Monument is 20 square miles of protected area. The John Day Fossil Beds in particular are very diverse. Six distinct ages ranging from 7 million to 44 million years ago can be found there. The fossil record is so reliable there that paleontologists around the world "are looking to this formation for correlation."

I'd learned in Your Inner Fish that lava beds were not good places to find fossils because the molten lava destroyed the beings it killed, and that former sea beds were good places to find fossils. In this case, it was volcanic activity that created these profuse fossil records, but it was mud flow that covered over and smothered everything, and since it was so fast, it was like a snapshot of all the living beings at one time, encased in mud which became rock.

While Thomas Condon must certainly have kept a record of where he found fossils, these days paleontologists can keep notebooks with precise locations, times, and pictures printed on the spot. In this rich territory in Oregon, a paleontologist can find "an entirely new basin that no one has collected before."

I can't recommend enough visiting this place as part of your visit to Eastern Oregon. It can't compare to the American Museum of Natural History, but it is chock full of information, and because of the unique fossil record of the area, has a wide range of fossils, post-dinosaurs. Wall murals depicting the animals and plants as they may have looked line the walls (well-done, not hokey as I remember museum visits from my childhood) and the exhibits are displayed as if on exposed rock. I took a bunch of pictures to look at later but there are plenty of photos and other things to explore at the National Parks website. (I may have more description work to do with those photos of mine, so check back later.)

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 8 and Finale

2011-10-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

BOOK VIII. SUNSET AND SUNRISE.

CHAPTER LXXII. Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before, Repeating things behind.

"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are," said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother.

Dorothea will be a champion for the buffeted Doctor. She also defies Sir James.

But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon. He smiled much less; when he said "Exactly" it was more often an introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissive bachelor days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve not to be afraid of him--all the more because he was really her best friend. He disagreed with her now. "But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake to manage a man's life for him in that way. Lydgate must know-- at least he will soon come to know how he stands. If he can clear himself, he will. He must act for himself."

I like Sir James, but I can't help but feel he is too unkind here. I guess he's more concerned for harm Dorothea might experience, than that a man's life could be ruined over something he didn't do. Or would his compassion allow him to let a man sink or swim in a pool full of sharks?

Besides, there is a man's character beforehand to speak for him." "But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do." "Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not be afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help him. Why should I be afraid?

Whereas once Dorothea was innocent and passionate, insisting on a course that would inevitably be harmful, now she seems to be the only reasonable person due to that same passion tempered by experience. Why should she be afraid?

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors." Dorothea's eyes had a moist brightness in them, and the changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, who began to listen. "It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother, almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.

I wonder if this is a key passage. Is this the difference between men and women in the public sphere? The difference between a savvy cleric and a saintly heart? Why would this kind of effort of sympathy be unlikely to succeed if men undertook them?

CHAPTER LXXIII. Pity the laden one; this wandering woe May visit you and me.

Lydgate mulls greatly, how to present himself?

He would not retreat before calumny, as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.

CHAPTER LXXIV. "Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together." --BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.

How Middlemarch lets a wife know her place, thanks to her husband's actions:

Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.

Catty, dark, mean, this gossip thing. Cue Kristen Bell, Gossip Girl narrator. Kristen, read this for me, please? No one could do it more justice.

Oddly, though, no one wished to tell Mrs. Bulstrode. They didn't want to be mean to her. And when she does find out, first she mourns, then she stands by her man. One of the most touching moments in the book, I think.

He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller-- he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly-- "Look up, Nicholas."

And in that simplicity, there is still complexity:

They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent."

CHAPTER LXXV. "Le sentiment de la fausset? des plaisirs pr?sents, et l'ignorance de la vanit? des plaisirs absents causent l'inconstance."--PASCAL.

The sense of the falsity of present pleasures, and ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Meanwhile, Rosamond courts Ladislaw.

She even fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?-- that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been busy before Will's departure.

CHAPTER LXXVI. "To mercy, pity, peace, and love All pray in their distress, And to these virtues of delight, Return their thankfulness. . . . . . . For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face; And Love, the human form divine; And Peace, the human dress. --WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.

Dorothea follows through:

"Not because there is no one to believe in you?" said Dorothea, pouring out her words in clearness from a full heart. "I know the unhappy mistakes about you. I knew them from the first moment to be mistakes. You have never done anything vile. You would not do anything dishonorable." It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on Lydgate's ears. He drew a deep breath, and said, "Thank you." He could say no more: it was something very new and strange in his life that these few words of trust from a woman should be so much to him. "I beseech you to tell me how everything was," said Dorothea, fearlessly. "I am sure that the truth would clear you."

She is like a balm on his heart. She even will help him with his marriage, though I wonder at the good that will do.

following the impulse to let Dorothea see deeper into the difficulty of his life, he said, "The fact is, this trouble has come upon her confusedly. We have not been able to speak to each other about it. ... "May I go and see her?" said Dorothea, eagerly. "Would she accept my sympathy? I would tell her that you have not been blamable before any one's judgment but your own. I would tell her that you shall be cleared in every fair mind. I would cheer her heart. Will you ask her if I may go to see her? I did see her once." "I am sure you may," said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some hope. ".... I will not speak to her about your coming--that she may not connect it with my wishes at all."

CHAPTER LXXVII. "And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot, To mark the full-fraught man and best indued With some suspicion." --Henry V.

There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him. That was a trouble which no third person must directly touch. But Dorothea thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy with her.

Oh...if only Rosamond were as Dorothea imagines.

CHAPTER LXXVIII. "Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave, With her sweet faith above for monument"

In which Rosamond makes a move for Will, who is thoroughly disgusted, and Dorothea happens upon them at just the wrong moment. Well, even though he hasn't been cleared in the eyes of his wife, Lydgate shines at what he does best.

"...Rosamond! has something agitated you?" Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her. He imagined that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that visit had raised.

CHAPTER LXXIX. "Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Despond."--BUNYAN.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

I wonder if any other of the men would have felt this obligation after a burst of cruelty. Mr. Garth perhaps. Would others have even realized how they were cruel? Not Sir James. Not Mr. Brooke. Mr. Farebrother wouldn't have got himself in that position: I think he'd see enough clues to avoid it.

CHAPTER LXXX. "Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong; And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. --WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.

Ahh...some comic relief via Miss Henrietta Noble.

...when suddenly some inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's attention. "Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?" "I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her beaver-like notes. ..."Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone of comprehension, getting up and hunting. ..."That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself. "If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon," said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better." "Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.

Dorothea resolves something in herself that night.

She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

CHAPTER LXXXI. "Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig, Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen, Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben, Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben. --Faust: 2r Theil.

Google translate and free ebooks to the rescue again...Faust speaking:

And thou, O Earth !—for nature still is true—
Didst, this night, of the common boon partake;
And, breathing in fresh vigour at my feet,
Already, with thy charms of new delight,
Dost in my heart the earnest wish awake
To strive towards Being's unascended height.

Dorothea visits Rosamond, who, thinking others would be like herself, thinks Dorothea comes with a mean purpose. But Dorothea comes to heal.

"...And I have told Mr. Farebrother, and Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam: they all believe in your husband. That will cheer you, will it not? That will give you courage?" Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before a superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor. She said, with blushing embarrassment, "Thank you: you are very kind."

And they share a moment. A rare true moment.

[Rosamond] withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers. What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying? And Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a silent tear. Pride was broken down between these two.

And Rosamond gives Dorothea the gift of truth, that Will rejected her due to another woman, Dorothea.

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known before. She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a knife-wound within her.

... "Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal, and it is time for me to go. I have always been accused of being immoderate and saying too much." She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet good-by without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between them too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it superficially.

CHAPTER LXXXII. "My grief lies onward and my joy behind." --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

Will is devastated but...

But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship. If Dorothea, after her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past seven that evening.

CHAPTER LXXXIII. "And now good-morrow to our waking souls Which watch not one another out of fear; For love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room, an everywhere." --DR. DONNE.

Oh! Miss Noble again, with her tortoise-shell lozenge box from Will. She comes with a message from him for Dorothea. How cute, that the little old spinster would be the messenger, and brings the two together at last. Will takes her hand...

Still it was difficult to loose the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed her, looked and moved away. "See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed," she said, walking towards the window, yet speaking and moving with only a dim sense of what she was doing.

Methinks it is an internal storm brewing as well.

"We may at least have the comfort of speaking to each other without disguise. Since I must go away--since we must always be divided--you may think of me as one on the brink of the grave." While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit each of them up for the other--and the light seemed to be the terror of a hopeless love. Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window; Will followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement; and so they stood, with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack and roll above them, and the rain began to pour down. Then they turned their faces towards each other, with the memory of his last words in them, and they did not loose each other's hands.

So classic...these days:

"...I meant to go away into silence, but I have not been able to do what I meant." "Don't be sorry," said Dorothea, in her clear tender tones. "I would rather share all the trouble of our parting." Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly, and then they moved apart. The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.

Cue big sigh.

CHAPTER LXXXIV. "Though it be songe of old and yonge, That I sholde be to blame, Theyrs be the charge, that spoke so large In hurtynge of my name." --The Not-Browne Mayde.

And so they will be married, despite the despicable will, or because of it.

"Oh, there is usually a silent exception in such cases," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "The only wonder to me is, that any of you are surprised. You did nothing to hinder it. If you would have had Lord Triton down here to woo her with his philanthropy, he might have carried her off before the year was over. There was no safety in anything else. Mr. Casaubon had prepared all this as beautifully as possible. He made himself disagreeable--or it pleased God to make him so--and then he dared her to contradict him. It's the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way."

What she said.

CHAPTER LIXXV. "Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his private verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman, the foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic. Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the earth! Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very look of him. Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I, said Mr. Live-loose; for he would be always condemning my way. Hang him, hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity. He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too good for him, said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way said Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him; therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death." --Pilgrim's Progress.

Pilgrim's Progress...never read it, and this doesn't make me want to.

Mr. Bulstrode is done for. The sad part, Mrs. Bulstrode must be done for with him. This is what harsh judgments do...they slay the innocent as well as the guilty. No matter what, no matter who. But together, they manage to do some good, and arrange for Fred to take over the running of the Stone Court estate, the very estate he thought he might inherit.

CHAPTER LXXXVI. "Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le conserve; de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se sont aimes des l'aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles amours prolonges. Il existe un embaumement d'amour. C'est de Daphnis et Chloe que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette vieillesse la, ressemblance du soir avec l'aurore." --VICTOR HUGO: L'homme qui rit.

"The heart is saturated with love as a divine salt that preserves it; of the incorruptible adherence of those who are like the dawn of life, and extenders freshness of the old loves. There is an embalming of love. It's Daphnis and Chloe are made as Philemon and Baucis. This old age the likeness of the evening with the dawn. "- VICTOR HUGO: The Man Who Laughs.

And Mary indeed ends up with Fred. Poor Mr. Farebrother.

FINALE.

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic--the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

We get to find out what happens to everyone! I like that part at the end of movies...so dissatisfying to be left wondering.

When Fred was riding home on winter evenings he had a pleasant vision beforehand of the bright hearth in the wainscoted parlor, and was sorry for other men who could not have Mary for their wife; especially for Mr. Farebrother. "He was ten times worthier of you than I was," Fred could now say to her, magnanimously. "To be sure he was," Mary answered; "and for that reason he could do better without me. But you--I shudder to think what you would have been-- a curate in debt for horse-hire and cambric pocket-handkerchiefs!"

Lydgate's hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so charming a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion.

At least one good impulse from Rosamond over the years:

Why then had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and placing above her. And thus the conversation ended with the advantage on Rosamond's side. But it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word in depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.

And Dorothea...

Still, she never repented that she had given up position and fortune to marry Will Ladislaw, and he would have held it the greatest shame as well as sorrow to him if she had repented. They were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. ...

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. [The End]

Must go back and look at those beginning lines about Theresa...and maybe find out more about Theresa.

Must think about "unhistoric acts."

Eastern Oregon Trip: Kam Wah Chung Museum

2011-10-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

Sheesh, I've been busy. Here it is almost two months later and I'm almost done with my travel chronicle. After a leisurely morning, breakfast in our room, packing and checkout by noon (love that noon checkout time), we left Baker City on Oregon HWY 26 East. If we stayed on 26 it would get us back to Portland, but our destiny took us north sooner than that.

First stop, the Kam Wah Chung Museum. Ever since we read Midnight at the Dragon Cafe for Everybody Reads in 2007, I've been interested in visiting John Day, and viewing the encapsulated history of Doc Hay in this museum. Included in the events for Everybody Reads were lectures on the history of Chinese and other Asians in Oregon. More recently, OPB's show Oregon Experience covered the history of the museum and Ing Hay and his business partner Lung On. Video here. It happened to air again before our trip, and my sweetie and I watched it together.

It turned out we couldn't visit the museum except in a guided tour, as too much damage was done when too many unescorted people wandered in the small space. We were lucky to arrive just a little before a tour...just enough time to use the restroom, buy a piece of Chinese calligraphy art, and view the displays in the visitor center.

In 1862 there was a gold rush in Oregon. At the same time the Civil War was preventing an influx of workers, so foreign workers were relied on to fill the gaps. As I mentioned before, only men were allowed. Doc Hay and Lung On left their families behind.

In 1882, no one but scholars were allowed to enter the country from China. After a certain point, even if they wanted to, the two men didn't dare return to China because they might not be allowed back. They remained in their adopted home of Oregon. Doc Hay wrote letters faithfully and sent money, and according to our guide, appeared to love his wife, though it was a traditional arranged marriage. Lung On, though, was apparently glad to leave his arranged marriage.

I found myself wondering again, what about their sex life? Did they have any once they moved to the U.S.? Did they dare? Could they have been lovers? If that were the case this could never have been hinted at for the history books. I like to think they were partners in more than the business sense, hiding their companionship in plain sight. I also wonder if the sexual revolution has indeed made us more sexualized, and if it was entirely common for unattached women as well as men simply to have no sex life. Lung On liked to gamble, and both liked to host a cadre of visitors. I can imagine them smoking, tossing coins, tiles, cards, shooting the shit, laughing at low humor, easing the unexpressed libido through innuendo and crude jokes.

In 1921 electricity arrived in John Day, and Ing Hay got it the first day. One later addition was a bedroom for Lung On, with its own entrance. This way Lung On wasn't disturbed when Doc Hay received a late night patient, and Doc Hay wasn't disturbed when Lung On returned from late nights spent drinking and gambling.

The grocery was closed down when Lung On died, and the business closed completely in 1948 when Doc Hay could no longer run his healing business. After his death, the building was closed completely. When the building was opened back up in 1969, they found items from the twenties to the forties. They also found Kentucky bourbon under the floorboards dated 1912-1918...so apparently this catch-all business that served both Chinese and whites also was prepared to be a speakeasy, or provide the speakeasy's liquor.

Erhu, or Chinese violin, on the right

There were pasted red papers with Chinese writing on the walls. I'm guessing this had something to do with New Year's celebrations.

These two men were the only Chinese to remain buried in the town. Everyone else had their remains sent back to their homeland as their tradition enjoined. Lung On didn't want the job, but he was the one who would dig up the bones and send them back to China. Doc Hay was buried with a Mason funeral.

Altars graced every room.

More details and photos here.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 7

2011-10-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

BOOK VII. TWO TEMPTATIONS.
I presume the two temptations are a continuation of the story of the widow and the wife.

CHAPTER LXIII. These little things are great to little man.--GOLDSMITH.

Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy spoke as little as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar had not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total absence of that interest in her husband's presence which a loving wife is sure to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him.

Poor Mr. Farebrother. Is he who notices the subtle details of the relationships of others doomed to have no intimate relationships for himself?

"Ah, there's enormous patience wanted with the way of the world. But it is the easier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends who love him, and ask for nothing better than to help him through, so far as it lies in their power." "Oh yes," said Lydgate, in a careless tone, changing his attitude and looking at his watch. "People make much more of their difficulties than they need to do." He knew as distinctly as possible that this was an offer of help to himself from Mr. Farebrother, and he could not bear it. So strangely determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.

Ah, the control. For some it is easier to dispense help rather than receive. To receive help means one is not in control and on top of things. To give help means others are obligated to you, to receive help means you are obligated to others. I don't think that bothers Lydgate so much as that his life is out of control, but if he can take care of it himself he maintains the illusion of control.

CHAPTER LXIV. 1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too. 2d Gent. Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright The coming pest with border fortresses, Or catch your carp with subtle argument. All force is twain in one: cause is not cause Unless effect be there; and action's self Must needs contain a passive. So command Exists but with obedience."

Who has the power? And even if they have the power, it cannot exist without those who are obedient. So do the obedient ones have the power, as without their passivity, the power could not exist?

It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck beneath this vile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state which was continually widening Rosamond's alienation from him. After the first disclosure about the bill of sale, he had made many efforts to draw her into sympathy with him about possible measures for narrowing their expenses, and with the threatening approach of Christmas his propositions grew more and more definite.

It appears Rosamond has the power, and Lydgate gives it to her. She would go to London, a pie in the sky idea, but there's no getting around her will.

"To do what? What is the use of my leaving my work in Middlemarch to go where I have none? We should be just as penniless elsewhere as we are here," said Lydgate still more angrily. "If we are to be in that position it will be entirely your own doing, Tertius," said Rosamond, turning round to speak with the fullest conviction.

While we, the reader, can see that she had a big hand in it with her spending on her trousseau, no one in the book, that I can remember, tells Rosamond she needs to take responsibility.

He had long ago made up his mind to what he thought was her negative character--her want of sensibility, which showed itself in disregard both of his specific wishes and of his general aims. The first great disappointment had been borne: the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced, and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs.

Rather than talk about this, Lydgate bears it all silently as his lot. What he thinks is her negative character is her stubborn willfulness. He doesn't get that she willfully does what she does, and that she has no respect for him. I wonder if the mere case of his falling in love with her due to her distress would make this inevitable.

CHAPTER LXV. "One of us two must bowen douteless, And, sith a man is more reasonable Than woman is, ye [men] moste be suffrable. --CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.

This is about the power again...since one must bow before the other, and a man will be more reasonable, he must bow before the unreasonable woman? Or he's operating on a different system than she is, so he gets the shorter end? This seems to be the case with Tertius and Rosamond. He shouldn't underestimate her.

Lydgate paused in his movements, looked at her again, and said, with biting severity-- "Will this be enough to convince you of the harm you may do by secret meddling? Have you sense enough to recognize now your incompetence to judge and act for me--to interfere with your ignorance in affairs which it belongs to me to decide on?"

Lydgate shouldn't consider Rosamond incompetent. That seems more benign than she deserves. She wouldn't care about her ignorance, she thinks she can make things happen the way she wills.

Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated. What place was there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in? He laid down his hat, flung an arm over the back of his chair, and looked down for some moments without speaking.

Darn right he's checkmated.

"It is so very hard to be disgraced here among all the people we know, and to live in such a miserable way. I wish I had died with the baby." She spoke and wept with that gentleness which makes such words and tears omnipotent over a loving-hearted man. Lydgate drew his chair near to hers and pressed her delicate head against his cheek with his powerful tender hand. He only caressed her; he did not say anything; for what was there to say?

And her conquest is complete.

CHAPTER LXVI. " 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall." --Measure for Measure.

Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. Mr. Farebrother's suspicion as to the opiate was true, however.

Will Dr. Lydgate fall from this? I find it hard to believe. Is this one of the two temptations?

And Fred? Is gambling to be his temptation again? He had...

ten pounds which he meant to reserve for himself from his half-year's salary (having before him the pleasure of carrying thirty to Mrs. Garth when Mary was likely to be come home again)-- he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund from which he might risk something, if there were a chance of a good bet.

Nope, not Fred, but Lydgate, gambling.

Fred felt a shock greater than he could quite account for by the vague knowledge that Lydgate was in debt, and that his father had refused to help him; and his own inclination to enter into the play was suddenly checked. It was a strange reversal of attitudes: Fred's blond face and blue eyes, usually bright and careless, ready to give attention to anything that held out a promise of amusement, looking involuntarily grave and almost embarrassed as if by the sight of something unfitting; while Lydgate, who had habitually an air of self-possessed strength, and a certain meditativeness that seemed to lie behind his most observant attention, was acting, watching, speaking with that excited narrow consciousness which reminds one of an animal with fierce eyes and retractile claws.

And Mr. Farebrother seals the deal of Fred's reformation.

Perhaps Mr. Farebrother's might be concentrated into a single shrug and one little speech. "To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!"

CHAPTER LXVII. Now is there civil war within the soul: Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier Makes humble compact, plays the supple part Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist For hungry rebels.

Lydgate asks for Bulstrode's help with his money owed. He is declined.

CHAPTER LXVIII. "What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well? If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion Act as fair parts with ends as laudable? Which all this mighty volume of events The world, the universal map of deeds, Strongly controls, and proves from all descents, That the directest course still best succeeds. For should not grave and learn'd Experience That looks with the eyes of all the world beside, And with all ages holds intelligence, Go safer than Deceit without a guide! --DANIEL: Musophilus.

Gah, these old wordings can be difficult to interpret. To think that once upon a time I read the original Chaucer and apparently understood it. This chapter is about Bulstrode...that gives me a clue. Ahh. His fortune begun in vice, in the end, he will get his, even though he wore the suit of virtue, to cover up, or repent, of his ill-gotten beginnings.

CHAPTER LXIX. "If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee." --Ecclesiasticus.

While Bulstrode hoped Raffles spoke to no one else, the man did, and consequently Mr. Garth quits.

"No," said Caleb, lifting his hand deprecatingly; "I am ready to believe better, when better is proved. I rob you of no good chance. As to speaking, I hold it a crime to expose a man's sin unless I'm clear it must be done to save the innocent. That is my way of thinking, Mr. Bulstrode, and what I say, I've no need to swear. I wish you good-day."

In other news, Lydgate seems to have hit bottom.

CHAPTER LXX. Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are."

The chapter in which Bulstrode repents of his treatment of Lydgate, and he somehow needs to shut up Raffles. Dr. Lydgate treats Raffles (with no knowledge of the true connection to Bulstrode) and Bulstrode gets instructions on the man's care. The innocent view: Bulstrode repents and helps Lydgate with his money problems, and the mistake with the instructions is just a mistake. The guilty view: Bulstrode bribes, and Lydgate looks the other way. The truth: somewhere in between, with a bit of unconscious desires mixed in.

CHAPTER LXXI. Clown. . . . 'Twas in the Bunch of Grapes, where, indeed, you have a delight to sit, have you not? Froth. I have so: because it is an open room, and good for winter. Clo. Why, very well then: I hope here be truths. --Measure for Measure.

Hmmm. The second quote from this Shakespeare play...one I have not read. Oh well. Maybe I'll get a chance to read it before I read Middlemarch again someday. If gossip is involved, little chance of truths here.

Hence, in spite of the negative as to any direct sign of guilt in relation to the death at Stone Court, Mr. Hawley's select party broke up with the sense that the affair had "an ugly look." But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact.

You can't get more public than a town meeting. So were the two temptations more about these men than about Fred or Rosamond? If they yielded to temptation, it doesn't appear to have been entirely conscious...and if unconscious, can it be said they did yield to temptation? And does it matter if the public has tried them in the gossip and found them guilty?

Lydgate felt sure there was not strength enough in him to walk away without support. What could he do? He could not see a man sink close to him for want of help. He rose and gave his arm to Bulstrode, and in that way led him out of the room; yet this act, which might have been one of gentle duty and pure compassion, was at this moment unspeakably bitter to him. It seemed as if he were putting his sign-manual to that association of himself with Bulstrode, of which he now saw the full meaning as it must have presented itself to other minds. He now felt the conviction that this man who was leaning tremblingly on his arm, had given him the thousand pounds as a bribe, and that somehow the treatment of Raffles had been tampered with from an evil motive.

Lydgate seals his fate as an accomplice, yet as a doctor he still cannot turn away from a man in distress.

He's a Big Cat, I Cannot Lie

2011-10-09T23:39:00.000-07:00

My cats are big cats, and Sandy is the larger. Like me, he believes in conservation of movement. If he can reach it without having to get up, he will not get up. He doesn't like to get into things and get in trouble, like Zigzag does. I play with him with a variety of toys. Together they do that cat chase thing, jumping over tables, just one paw touching, flying over chairs and the couch, zipping in a second from one end of the room to the other. So while Sandy would lie down rather than come to you, he does play and get plenty of activity.

I bring this up because when I took them for their annual checkup last month, their vet tried to scare me into thinking I needed to put them on diet food. Last year, she wanted me to limit their dry food, and only let them have the food for a limited time each day. Both visits, she said, "These cats are big-boned and tend to weigh more, and you have to be careful about them getting overweight."

I think this is a sad example of our societal eating disorder. Excess weight is so scary, such a bad bad thing, that pets are put on diets before they've even reached full adult age. They aren't even overweight yet, but in the attempt to start those good eating habits, I as their caretaker am told to limit their calories or the big bad will happen. If they are big-boned and genetically prone to weigh more, why this fear of letting them weigh more?

I told her I'd tried the year before to separate and limit their food, but separating them made them too anxious. She interrupted me, "You mean it made you anxious? You couldn't listen to their meowing?" I stopped, confused. Oh, she thinks I couldn't bear to make them go without food. "Nooo... they wouldn't eat because they were anxious when I tried to separate them." I don't think she really heard me, as I suspect she looks at me and thinks I am transferring my own "eating disorder" to my cats, while I likewise think she is putting this irrational fear of weight that Americans have onto my cats. Don't get me wrong, I think she's a great vet, except for this. She did say, check it out, do your research, make your own choice. Perhaps she is paid to hawk their products, but doesn't necessarily believe in them.

She handed me a brochure for Purina Overweight Management food with valuable coupons. So just like the societal eating disorder for humans, the one for animals is brought to you by those who would make money over it...much more money than for their regular food. Sorry, but I'm not buying it. I don't trust Purina. I've always bought good health food for cats, and Purina doesn't qualify. This brochure had a "success" story about a cat that lost a bunch of weight and was so much happier. Not a word about ingredients, about nutritional information, but only about weight loss and calories. So I looked it up. First ingredient? Corn gluten meal. Second? Wheat gluten. Finally, the fourth ingredient is poultry by-product meal. Hey, I'm a vegetarian, but I don't expect my cats to be!

Compare that to my Trader Joe's brand, first ingredient chicken meal. Even that is not quite as good as the dry food these cat experts found, in which the first ingredient is unadulterated chicken. My vet did say that cats don't get overweight if they eat only wet food. When my kittens found me, I wanted the best for them. I tried giving them only wet food. For a while, they really liked it. Then they started eating less, and they started eating my books, eating electrical cords, shoelaces, anything plastic. They wanted to chew and crunch. They were weaned on dry food with a little bit of wet, and that is what they prefer.

So within the first year, I broke down and started buying dry food, but only the good stuff. I looked at ash content (the lower the better), at protein percentage (the higher the better, obviously) and moisture content. I used to swear by Science Diet, but Bench and Field Holistic Natural, at Trader Joe's, stacks up even better. It even has blueberries in it. TJ's now has its own brand of healthy cat food as well, and I can't really see a difference, except the first is in a star shape, and the second, a saucer shape.

It took a while for the cats even to be interested in wet food again. They wouldn't touch Trader Joe's brand. I started getting a variety, small cans only, and only the healthy brands. If it was the same two days in a row, they wouldn't eat it.

I was curious, just how "overweight" is my sweet boy Sandy? I didn't know when I adopted them that they are part Maine Coon, as their mom was slender and small-boned, normal hair. According to the chart on this web page, the average weight of a Maine Coon is 16 lbs. Male cats can range from 15-25 lbs. It seems my Sandy could be just above average weight, with his big bones, yet I'm supposed to start depriving him of calories, and limiting how much food he gets. Zigzag is currently 12.8 lbs, and Sandy, 17.0.

Rather than buy a cat food that bulks up by adding grains that cats aren't able to digest (is this weight management via adverse food reactions?), I'm going to continue to give my cats all the dry food they want, the stuff that at least starts its ingredients with a form of chicken. I've started giving them a small can to share morning and evening, instead of just evening, and they are liking that. They also seem to like the food more with the addition of probiotic powder (oh...another Purina product). I'm figuring, more wet food means they will naturally eat less dry food.

While I researched, I discovered according to some it actually is good for cats to be able to nibble unhindered, and that is better done with dry food, as the wet food will go bad. I knew too much ash content is bad, but didn't know why. It has to do with urinary tract disease. Regular grazing, rather than segregated amounts of food, keeps the pH level of the urine from fluctuating too much.

All of that to say, I'm sure I'm doing the right thing for my cats.

Zigzag shows his belly, Sandy looks on.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 6

2011-10-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

It was my plan to be reading Book 8 this week. I was a book behind last week, but now I am indeed on the last book of this large tome, though I am still catching up with the blogging part.

In my search for annotations which might include translations, I found this list of websites on Eliot. I may want to visit it when I am done with the book. Soon now, soon. I found the translation, incidentally, by first using Google Translate, and then searching for particular words in the particular book in Google Books. Ahh, isn't life grand these days? (So yes, these blogs take me a little while, as it's not just about reflecting and writing.)

BOOK VI. THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.

CHAPTER LIV. "Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore; Per che si fa gentil eio ch'ella mira: Ov'ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira, E cui saluta fa tremar lo core. Sicche, bassando il viso, tutto smore, E d'ogni suo difetto allor sospira: Fuggon dinanzi a lei Superbia ed Ira: Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore. Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile Nasee nel core a chi parlar la sente; Ond' e beato chi prima la vide. Quel ch'ella par quand' un poco sorride, Non si pub dicer, ne tener a mente, Si e nuovo miracolo gentile." --DANTE: la Vita Nuova.

Translation:

My lady carries love within her eyes
All that she looks on is made pleasanter
Upon her path men turn to gaze at her
He whom she greeteth feels his heart to rise
And droops his troubled visage full of sighs
And of his evil heart is then aware
Hate loves and pride becomes a worshipper
E women help to praise her in somewise
Humbleness and the hope that hopeth well
By speech of hers into the mind are brought
And who beholds is blessed oftenwhiles
The look she hath when she a little smiles
Cannot be said nor holden in the thought
Tis such a new and gracious miracle. Dante's The New Life

Is this saying all a man needs is the love of a good woman?

but to an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behavior is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him exhaustible. This possibility was quite hidden from Celia, who felt that Dorothea's childless widowhood fell in quite prettily with the birth of little Arthur (baby was named after Mr. Brooke).

This is the second time Celia's baby is referred to as a Bouddha, the first referenced hair, or perhaps the lack of it, I wasn't sure. Certainly, he appears to be meant to provide comic relief.

"Good God!" Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still in his hand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly turned and leaned his back against it. The blood had mounted to his face and neck, and he looked almost angry. It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning. But there was no help for it.

The two appear to be falling in love, for all the wrong reasons as it often seems of characters in this book. Or is this how we always fall in love? Is there no escape from the blindness of our own projections? These two see each other, yet do not. They don't know the full story, and respond to another story in the other. I think nowadays there is a help for it. There is the possibility of radical honesty. There is the possibility of speaking truth in intimacy without judgement, without censorship.

CHAPTER LV. Hath she her faults? I would you had them too. They are the fruity must of soundest wine; Or say, they are regenerating fire Such as hath turned the dense black element Into a crystal pathway for the sun. If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.
We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

The Widow: Dorothea pines for Will Ladislaw, now especially that he is forbidden. Celia carries the idea to Sir James that Dorothea thinks never to marry again. This fits his view of widows, even though she's a young widow.

Sir Henry Wotton

CHAPTER LVI. "How happy is he born and taught That serveth not another's will; Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his only skill! . . . . . . . This man is freed from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall; Lord of himself though not of lands; And having nothing yet hath all." --SIR HENRY WOTTON. [friend of John Donne]

The rail is coming to Middlemarch, and the people in their usual resistance to change think it will be a bad thing. The scene: rabblerousers would run off the rail suveyors. Fred Vincy and Caleb Garth see this and assist the rail workers and deal with the locals. Fred gets job with Caleb. This looks good for Fred, with regards to Mary.

CHAPTER LVII. They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur, And larger yet with wonder love belief Toward Walter Scott who living far away Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.

Mrs. Farebrother, mother to the cleric who would woo Mary, talks to Mary of her feelings toward clergy. To be fair to Mrs. Farebrother, it does seem a rather inane reason to leave clergy out of the running:

"I don't like their neckcloths." "Why, you don't like Camden's, then," said Miss Winifred, in some anxiety. "Yes, I do," said Mary. "I don't like the other clergymen's neckcloths, because it is they who wear them." "How very puzzling!" said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect was probably deficient. "My dear, you are joking. You would have better reasons than these for slighting so respectable a class of men," said Mrs. Farebrother, majestically.

CHAPTER LVIII. "For there can live no hatred in thine eye, Therefore in that I cannot know thy change: In many's looks the false heart's history Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange: But Heaven in thy creation did decree That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell: Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell." --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

The Wife: Lydgate and Rosamond squabble over the visit of his cousin the Captain. She enjoys the attention, he sees the sparkle dim from his infatuation. He must deal with the tremendous debt from their marriage, she would refuse to make any changes. This does not bode well.

CHAPTER LIX. They said of old the Soul had human shape, But smaller, subtler than the fleshly self, So wandered forth for airing when it pleased. And see! beside her cherub-face there floats A pale-lipped form aerial whispering Its promptings in that little shell her ear."

The Widow:

Now Lydgate, like Mr. Farebrother, knew a great deal more than he told, and when he had once been set thinking about the relation between Will and Dorothea his conjectures had gone beyond the fact. He imagined that there was a passionate attachment on both sides, and this struck him as much too serious to gossip about. He remembered Will's irritability when he had mentioned Mrs. Casaubon, and was the more circumspect.

The Wife:

She was oppressed by ennui, and by that dissatisfaction which in women's minds is continually turning into a trivial jealousy, referring to no real claims, springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness of egoism, and yet capable of impelling action as well as speech.

CHAPTER LX. Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. --Justice Shallow. [old friend of Falstaff's, Henry IV, part 2]

Uh-oh. Raffles makes an appearance again. The sale, like a fair, is a fun scene.

CHAPTER LXI. "Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true."--Rasselas. [from The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson]

Like a pearl, Mr. Bulstrode's good works have grown around a flaw, a dark seed coming from a lie. His money first came from questionable pawnbrokers, then he withheld knowledge of his wife's daughter, a daughter who would inherit her money. Instead he did. And this is what Raffles has on him. And this is what propels him to good deeds with his fortune. In a way he's pathetic, but he is also just trying to maintain his family's position.

CHAPTER LXII. "He was a squyer of lowe degre, That loved the king's daughter of Hungrie. --Old Romance.

OK, now Dorothea and Will both know the conditions of their divide. And so they part. "She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant without speaking, for her words had seemed to him cruelly cold and unlike herself. Their eyes met, but there was discontent in his, and in hers there was only sadness."

How could he dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had placed between them?--how could she ever say to herself that she would defy it? Will's certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance, had much more bitterness in it. Very slight matters were enough to gall him in his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he felt himself plodding along as a poor devil seeking a position in a world which in his present temper offered him little that he coveted, made his conduct seem a mere matter of necessity, and took away the sustainment of resolve.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 5

2011-10-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

BOOK V. THE DEAD HAND.
CHAPTER XLIII. This figure hath high price: 't was wrought with love Ages ago in finest ivory; Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines Of generous womanhood that fits all time That too is costly ware; majolica Of deft design, to please a lordly eye: The smile, you see, is perfect--wonderful As mere Faience! a table ornament To suit the richest mounting."

When Mrs. Casaubon visits the doctor to learn about her husband's health, we get a glimpse into Rosamond's thoughts. She realizes even though she is married, she can make conquests. Could it be she is the table ornament?

CHAPTER XLIV. I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

With his age, do Casaubon and Dorothea ever have a real chance? His paranoia widens the rift: "He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?"

CHAPTER XLV. It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Gossip about the outsider Dr. Lydgate: he wants to cut up bodies willy-nilly; he never ever dispenses drugs; and is ">disagreeably inattentive to etiquette."
That last bit is probably true.

Advice from Farebrother: don't get too close to Bulstrode; don't get into debt. Can you say "foreshadow?"

CHAPTER XLVI. Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos aquello que podremos. Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get. --Spanish Proverb.

Wo, what? Or how about "You can't always get what you want/ And if you try sometime you find/ You get what you need" or "and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with..."?

You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius." "Do I? Then I am a brute," said Lydgate, caressing her penitently. "What vexed you?" "Oh, outdoor things--business." It was really a letter insisting on the payment of a bill for furniture. But Rosamond was expecting to have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.

So the one she's with doesn't make enough money, and the one he's with is a flibbertigibbet.

CHAPTER XLVII. Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain. No art can make it: it must spring Where elements are fostering. So in heaven's spot and hour Springs the little native flower, Downward root and upward eye, Shapen by the earth and sky.

Will Ladislaw in his smitten state finds a loophole in Casaubon's order to stay way: church! But one should be careful what one wishes for.

Will walked out after them, but they went on towards the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never looking round. It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in the morning. The lights were all changed for him both without and within.

CHAPTER XLVIII Surely the golden hours are turning gray And dance no more, and vainly strive to run: I see their white locks streaming in the wind-- Each face is haggard as it looks at me, Slow turning in the constant clasping round Storm-driven.

Casaubon would shackle Dorothea from beyond the grave. She has some small will to choose for herself left, and takes some time to decide whether to promise. Perhaps the cosmos is smiling on her after all...he dies before she can say yes.

CHAPTER XLIX. A task too strong for wizard spells This squire had brought about; 'T is easy dropping stones in wells, But who shall get them out?"

But Casaubon extends his suspicions from beyond the grave. Sir James continues to be the knightly gentleman as her brother-in-law:

"I say that he has most unfairly compromised Dorothea. I say that there never was a meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this--a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family-- a positive insult to Dorothea!"

CHAPTER L. "`This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.' `Nay by my father's soule! that schal he nat,' Sayde the Schipman, `here schal he not preche, We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven all in the gret God,' quod he. He wolden sowen some diffcultee." Canterbury Tales.

Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did.

Dorothea is transformed by the knowledge of her husband that his death brought her. Relationships change even after death, and a person is affected.

CHAPTER LI. Party is Nature too, and you shall see By force of Logic how they both agree: The Many in the One, the One in Many; All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any: Genus holds species, both are great or small; One genus highest, one not high at all; Each species has its differentia too, This is not That, and He was never You, Though this and that are AYES, and you and he Are like as one to one, or three to three.

Mr. Brooke tries his hand at politics...not very good at it, but Ladislaw is, whom he has taken on.

CHAPTER LII. "His heart The lowliest duties on itself did lay." --WORDSWORTH.

Mr. Farebrother as cleric has the unwelcome task of acting as go-between for Fred and Mary. Will she have him? But Mr. Farebrother cannot say he likes her himself. What a soap opera!

CHAPTER LIII. It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders call inconsistency--putting a dead mechanism of "ifs" and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought into mutual sustainment.

Mr. Raffles had pushed away his chair and looked down at himself, particularly at his straps. His chief intention was to annoy Bulstrode, but he really thought that his appearance now would produce a good effect, and that he was not only handsome and witty, but clad in a mourning style which implied solid connections.

Mr. Raffles is not just visiting Bulstrode to blackmail, he's there to blackmail with panache.

Eastern Oregon Trip: Elkhorn Scenic Byway

2011-09-26T23:24:00.000-07:00

After shuffling through two museums, we were ready to go for a drive. Our first destination outside of Baker City was Sumpter, Oregon, a little over a half-hour drive. Sumpter doesn't qualify as a ghost-town, but it has plenty of those Old West buildings, and it has a ghost-dredge....a retired gold dredge, that is.

The gold dredge used water to pull the gold out of the soil. The material sluiced through the moving building, water washing the gold to the bottom of the sluices, along with other heavy materials, and the lighter materials were dumped out the back. The gold bits mixed with black sand were tumbled in a barrel with mercury-coated paddles. The gold bonded with the mercury, while the black sand escaped below. I wonder if the person responsible for this gave the Mad Hatter a run for his money. I also wonder how much mercury escaped into the ponds and piles and the Powder River.

This was the last of three dredges built on the Powder River, built in 1935, retired in 1954.. After viewing the dredge inside and out, it was mid-afternoon, and we had a choice: retrace our drive back to Baker City, or keep going on the scenic byway. If we returned, we'd have enough time to visit the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, but if we kept going we'd see walls built by the Chinese, ghost towns, and pass over the mountains. We decided to keep going, and there might still be time to make it to the Interpretive Center. First detour off the byway: Granite.

Granite was supposed to be a ghost town, but it looked pretty occupied, and while the old buildings were minimally renovated, you could see the modern energy-efficient doors and windows. The next stop on the byway was to visit the Chinese Walls, but now that I research, I see I was looking at the wrong thing!

"The Ah Hee Diggings, also called the Chinese Walls, are sixty acres of hand-stacked, winding rock walls constructed of placer mine tailings. The walls were built by Chinese miners who worked gold-mining claims for the Ah Hee Placer Mining Company along a five-mile stretch of Granite Creek from 1867 to 1891." source, link above

All the signs showed the stop with stone barriers, so I took photos of those, but what this website shows as walls were not cemented rocks, but piled rocks.

Before Granite we went over a pass of 5,864 feet, and after, a pass at over 7,800 feet, and we saw a mountain still a 1,000 feet higher. The temperature up there was 66 degrees, and when we got to the valley, it was 81 degrees.

We made it to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center just 20 minutes before they closed. They didn't charge us, though my sweetie donated some money anyway, and they informed us that we could look but we had to be out of the parking lot by 6 pm.

After, we would have liked to stop to see wagon trail ruts near the road, but we had little time to catch some dinner, then go back to Sumpter for our moonlight train ride on the Sumpter Valley Railway. (We ordered room service again for a quick but tasty meal.) We'll just have to visit the End of the Oregon Trail nearby in Oregon City sometime soon. More photos of the dredge, the mountain drive, and the Oregon Trail center can be found here, along with further details.

Normally one would ride this train during the day, but because there was a full moon and the Perseid Meteor Showers were expected, this Moonlight Express was scheduled. Just at that point in time when the next moment I couldn't see, the moment just before that, I saw a deer. This was the extent of our wildlife spotting, other than birds and chipmunks. After twilight fell I spent most of my time with my head back looking at the sky above. Of course that bright lamp of the full moon didn't help any for spotting shooting stars, but I did see one, on our trip back to McEwan Station. The 7 mile trip was extended in time thanks to changing of the engine from front to back, so it would be front again after Sumpter Station. Also, we had cake. More photos and details here.

This was a very full day.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 4

2011-09-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

BOOK IV. THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
Three love problems....hmmm. Mary and Fred? Rosamond and Mr. Lydgate? Dorothea and Casaubon?
CHAPTER XXXIV. 1st Gent. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws. Carry no weight, no force. 2d Gent. But levity Is causal too, and makes the sum of weight. For power finds its place in lack of power; Advance is cession, and the driven ship May run aground because the helmsman's thought Lacked force to balance opposites."

If any one will here contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.

In other words, if you thought there must be goodness in him, you didn't know Featherstone.

Watching funeral attendees...a day's entertainment:

"Ah, now they are coming out of church," Mrs. Cadwallader exclaimed. "Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set! Mr. Lydgate as doctor, I suppose. But that is really a good looking woman, and the fair young man must be her son. Who are they, Sir James, do you know?" "I see Vincy, the Mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife and son," said Sir James

CHAPTER XXXV. "Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir Que de voir d'heritiers une troupe affligee Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongee, Lire un long testament ou pales, etonnes On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez. Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde Je reviendrais, je crois, expres de l'autre monde." --REGNARD: Le Legataire Universel.

Google translates (hey, don't knock it...my two years of French for reading knowledge was over 20 years ago): "No, I do not understand a more charming pleasure to see a troop of heirs afflicted Maintaining prohibited, and the long face, read a will or long blades, astonished They leave a good evening with a snub. To see in their natural deep sadness I would, I believe, expression of the other world. "- REGNARD: The sole heir.

There was still a residue of personal property as well as the land, but the whole was left to one person, and that person was-- O possibilities! O expectations founded on the favor of "close" old gentlemen! O endless vocatives that would still leave expression slipping helpless from the measurement of mortal folly!-- that residuary legatee was Joshua Rigg, who was also sole executor, and who was to take thenceforth the name of Featherstone.

And Mary, no one knows but Mary, could have caused a different outcome. So, problem one: Mary ruined Fred Vincy's chances, and thus his chances with her.

CHAPTER XXXVI. "'Tis strange to see the humors of these men, These great aspiring spirits, that should be wise: . . . . . . . . For being the nature of great spirits to love To be where they may be most eminent; They, rating of themselves so farre above Us in conceit, with whom they do frequent, Imagine how we wonder and esteeme All that they do or say; which makes them strive To make our admiration more extreme, Which they suppose they cannot, 'less they give Notice of their extreme and highest thoughts. --DANIEL: Tragedy of Philotas.

"Walter, you never mean to tell me that you have allowed all this to go on without inquiry into Mr. Lydgate's prospects?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, opening her eyes with wider gravity at her brother, who was in his peevish warehouse humor. "Think of this girl brought up in luxury--in too worldly a way, I am sorry to say-- what will she do on a small income?"

Problem two: Rosamond will spend beyond Lydgate's means.

CHAPTER XXXVII. "Thrice happy she that is so well assured Unto herself and settled so in heart That neither will for better be allured Ne fears to worse with any chance to start, But like a steddy ship doth strongly part The raging waves and keeps her course aright; Ne aught for tempest doth from it depart, Ne aught for fairer weather's false delight. Such self-assurance need not fear the spight Of grudging foes; ne favour seek of friends; But in the stay of her own stedfast might Neither to one herself nor other bends. Most happy she that most assured doth rest, But he most happy who such one loves best." --SPENSER.

Not for one moment did Mr. Casaubon suspect Dorothea of any doubleness: he had no suspicions of her, but he had (what was little less uncomfortable) the positive knowledge that her tendency to form opinions about her husband's conduct was accompanied with a disposition to regard Will Ladislaw favorably and be influenced by what he said.

Problem three: Not, as I might have expected, the popping of Dorothea's bubble of Mr. Casaubon, but Mr. Casaubon's jealousy stemming from feelings of inadequacy.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. "C'est beaucoup que le jugement des hommes sur les actions humaines; tot ou tard il devient efficace."--GUIZOT.
"It's great, men's judgment over human actions, sooner or later it becomes effective."

Uh-oh...politics.

CHAPTER XXXIX. "If, as I have, you also doe, Vertue attired in woman see, And dare love that, and say so too, And forget the He and She; And if this love, though placed so, From prophane men you hide, Which will no faith on this bestow, Or, if they doe, deride: Then you have done a braver thing Than all the Worthies did, And a braver thence will spring, Which is, to keep that hid." --DR. DONNE.

Oh the intrigue! Sir James gets Dorothea to her uncle's estate so she can get him on the right track regarding the estate, and politics, but he has to pretend she's visiting Celia. Will is there, who is forbidden to visit by Casaubon, and of course, Will's smittenness deepens. And Brooke...he quarreled with Garth years ago? The interconnections of Middlemarch, a small world.

CHAPTER XL. Wise in his daily work was he: To fruits of diligence, And not to faiths or polity, He plied his utmost sense. These perfect in their little parts, Whose work is all their prize-- Without them how could laws, or arts, Or towered cities rise?

Thanks to the machinations of Sir James, the Garths are pulled up out of their poverty. The Garths tell the vicar, Mr. Farebrother, who often visits the Vincys, about Mary's secret late night with the old man and her indirect influence on Fred Vincy's lack of inheritance.

CHAPTER XLI. "By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day. --Twelfth Night

He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been entirely successful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask. The paper with which he had wedged it was a letter signed Nicholas Bulstrode, but Raffles was not likely to disturb it from its present useful position.

The surprise heir Rigg has a surprise ne'erdowell step-father. What will he do with that letter from Bulstrode?

CHAPTER XLII. "How much, methinks, I could despise this man Were I not bound in charity against it! --SHAKESPEARE: Henry VIII.

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

I think this narrator is a closet Buddhist. That's what it's all about...this troublesome self.

Now Dorothea's belief in her husband begins to erode. The honeymoon's over, and the two don't know how to connect to each other, he especially.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 3, Chapters 28-33

2011-09-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER XXVIII. 1st Gent. All times are good to seek your wedded home Bringing a mutual delight. 2d Gent. Why, true. The calendar hath not an evil day For souls made one by love, and even death Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves While they two clasped each other, and foresaw No life apart.

CHAPTER XXIX. "I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort."--GOLDSMITH.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

Casaubon is a small man, who managed to land a great wife.

CHAPTER XXX. "Qui veut delasser hors de propos, lasse."--PASCAL.
Translation, thanks to this blogger: Whoever tries to divert us at the wrong time tires us out

Lydgate would have taken no notice of these words as anything more than the Vicar's usual way of putting things. They seemed now to convey an innuendo which confirmed the impression that he had been making a fool of himself and behaving so as to be misunderstood: not, he believed, by Rosamond herself; she, he felt sure, took everything as lightly as he intended it.

Or not. Clueless. Everyone is clueless.

CHAPTER XXXI. How will you know the pitch of that great bell Too large for you to stir? Let but a flute Play 'neath the fine-mixed metal listen close Till the right note flows forth, a silvery rill. Then shall the huge bell tremble--then the mass With myriad waves concurrent shall respond In low soft unison.

That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love. Remember that the ambitious man who was looking at those Forget-me-nots under the water was very warm-hearted and rash. He did not know where the chain went; an idea had thrilled through the recesses within him which had a miraculous effect in raising the power of passionate love lying buried there in no sealed sepulchre, but under the lightest, easily pierced mould. His words were quite abrupt and awkward; but the tone made them sound like an ardent, appealing avowal. "What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me, pray."

So how it happens...a crystallizing moment. Words unfold, love awakened. So seemingly inconsequential, but that enormous fullness of love was just shimmering beneath a thin skin, ready for a single moment to allow it to burst out.

CHAPTER XXXII. "They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk." --SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.

For the old man's dislike of his own family seemed to get stronger as he got less able to amuse himself by saying biting things to them. Too languid to sting, he had the more venom refluent in his blood. Not fully believing the message sent through Mary Garth, they had presented themselves together within the door of the bedroom, both in black--Mrs. Waule having a white handkerchief partially unfolded in her hand--and both with faces in a sort of half-mourning purple...

The vultures circle, waiting to feast on the old man's remains.

CHAPTER XXXIII. "Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close; And let us all to meditation." --2 Henry VI.

In a very little while there was no longer any doubt that Peter Featherstone was dead, with his right hand clasping the keys, and his left hand lying on the heap of notes and gold.

This death scene was so Dickensian, was it not? Mary Garth alone with the old man, who would pull his puppet strings of the people around him to his last breath, but she would not be put in that spot.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 3, Chapters 23-27

2011-09-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

My days are just packed. I've been reading this, as well as another very long book. This coming week I start co-teaching that class at the Zen Center, and that involves the class time as well as preparation and an extra meeting each week. To top it off, I signed up for a training at work this week. Oh, and Dharma School starts this Sunday...not next Sunday. So....gonna be a little behind on the reflective blogging bit.

BOOK III. WAITING FOR DEATH.
CHAPTER XXIII. "Your horses of the Sun," he said, "And first-rate whip Apollo! Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head, But I will beat them hollow."

And Fred winced under the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at once the poorest and the kindest--namely, Caleb Garth.

Oh Fred Fred Fred. Bad idea. Way to ruin things with Mary.

Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain, and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in addition--only five pounds more than he had expected to give.

Oh Fred Fred Fred, way to fall from the frying pan into the fire. You got all excited about that horse sight unseen, so of course you didn't see the flaws.

CHAPTER XXIV. "The offender's sorrow brings but small relief To him who wears the strong offence's cross." --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
Fred...

had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen.

That's putting it lightly. Foolish, happy-go-lucky, selfish Fred.

W. Blake

CHAPTER XXV. "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell's despair. . . . . . . . Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite." --W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience
And here are your consequences, Fred:

"I will try to be anything you like, Mary, if you will say that you love me." "I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him. What will you be when you are forty?

CHAPTER XXVI. "He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise--that I could beat him while he railed at me.--" --Troilus and Cressida.

Fred takes ill, Wrench barely does his duty as doc, and the Vincys take on Lydgate for a doctor. Gossip ensues, romance soon to follow.

CHAPTER XXVII. Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

Girl flirts with Doctor, considers herself practically engaged. Doctor flirts with girl, thinking that's just what they do.

It is true, Lydgate had the counter-idea of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a shadow east by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking. Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond's idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate's lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it.

Lydgate sure has been blind to her possible effect on him, as his mind has been more on research and doctoring than on girls.

Eastern Oregon Trip: Museums

2011-09-12T23:50:00.001-07:00

First view on entering the Adler Museum

We managed to pack two or three days into one. On our one full day away from home, we managed to see two museums, travel the Elkhorn Scenic Byway, which included several "ghost towns" and a state heritage sight, the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, and a moonlight ride on an historic train.

After our leisurely room service breakfast, we were ready to do some of that walking around and about that tourists do, so first we went to the Adler House Museum. We happened to arrive just as the museum guide was starting a tour.

Leo Adler lived his entire life in this house, was a major philanthropist in Baker City, never married, and left his fortune to Baker County, including his house. Once he lived alone in the house he closed up the entire upstairs, closed up the front rooms, and only lived in two rooms in the rear of the house. The unused rooms became unheated storage rooms. In some ways this helped preserve household pieces, as they went unused, but weather extremes probably didn't help, and the rooms were never cleaned. Leo was a generous person, and if someone said they liked something, he was apt to give it to them...like the unique lamp at the bottom of the stairs. Leo had given it away to a friend, but museum curators were able to ask for, and get it back. The butler's pantry did not have a full set of dishes because Leo gave many of those away too.

Leo receives award for good deeds from the Pope

As we proceeded on the tour, I found myself wondering about those parts left unsaid. Why did Leo and his sister and his brother never marry? Was it because they were Jewish and perhaps there weren't many Jewish people in Oregon? Did any of them have lovers? Our guide showed us a "Chap Book". I didn't get it right away, as I immediately thought of the usual usage of the term. She told us young ladies of the day would keep a book like this to keep track of their dates and whether they liked them. Oooohhh! Chap book. They called them "chaps" in the day. It was the size of a yearly diary, and with room for about 5 chaps per page, there was room for a lot of chaps. It looked as though Elizabeth had many entries, a good twenty pages, though it nowhere near filled the book. All her entries listed the eye color...blue eyes...brown eyes...but as far as I could see as the guide riffed through the book, no opinions on how she liked the boys. Poor Elizabeth died at the age of 33 of the flu. Before that she taught kindergarten in the home. Were all these chaps unworthy, or was Elizabeth just not interested in that? Leo too? Even with prejudice, he would have been a fine catch, but it seems he was uninterested.

for more photos from the Adler House Museum, go here

Since we happened upon the tour, we took a little longer here than we intended. Next, we went to the Baker Heritage Museum. Like the Tillamook Museum, which I am fond of visiting when at the coast, there was an interesting mix of natural history and people history. Whenever I visit these exhibits, it reignites my interest in rocks and fossils. Among the many collections I had as a tween was a rock and fossil collection. I keep meaning to ask my mom what happened to that. I doubt she still has it.

After I got my camera out in readiness, and as we showed our tickets we'd got at the first museum (it cost less to visit both), my sweetie pointed out the sign that said no photography was allowed. The clerk told us photos were okay, just no flash was allowed. Good thing, because there was too much to see, and photos help me reflect on and remember things.

The Crystal Palace

I noticed that when you visit small museums like this, the exhibits depicting life back when look very similar...especially the schoolrooms. However, this museum also had rooms that depicted very specific pieces of Baker County history, such as the shop that Leo Adler's father owned, The Crystal Palace.

What might make these little County museums unique are these specific histories. In Tillamook, there's an entire wall of portrait photos of founding citizens (see Elbridge Trask, immortalized by Don Berry in Trask). Here, there was a particular focus on mining and logging history, as well as these scenes featuring the histories of specific citizens. And I wonder, do all these museums have some stuffed animals? I remind myself these animals would long be dead already anyway.

Coming next, our scenic drive. I leave you with the photo of the model for the film set of Paint Your Wagon.

For more photos of the Baker Heritage Museum collections, go here.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 2, Chapters 18-22

2011-09-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER XVIII "Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy."

Lydgate continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode. He was really uncertain whether Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should have voted for Mr. Farebrother.

but later...

Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.

Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black? Or does he think it an expression of will to vote against what others expect? Hardly seems so to me...seems to me his actions then are all about what others expect.

CHAPTER XIX "L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia Della sua palma, sospirando, letto." --Purgatorio, vii.

They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair.

Here I find the benefit not only of reviewing for the sake of blogging, but of the use of my Kindle. Currently, I've just read through Book III, and the image of Ariadne is fresh in my mind from that reading. So, looking back, this jumps out at me, and now I want to know more about Ariadne. And, thanks to my Kindle, I can easily find all the references to Ariadne in Middlemarch. There are just these two occurrences in which Ariadne is named. This one refers to Dorothea Brooke next to the Ariadne statue, witnessed by Will Ladislaw and his German buddy. The statue draws attention to Dorothea's beauty due to her vivid life as contrasted to the dead stone, and due to her Christian bearing and "Quakerish gray drapery," as contrasted to the Greek fable. The next occurrence likens the young woman Rosamond to Ariadne...more on that later...but I will say I think this may prove significant in the difference between these two women.

Antigone by Lord Frederick Leighton

"Confound you, Naumann! I don't know what I shall do. I am not so brazen as you." "Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you were an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form animated by Christian sentiment--a sort of Christian Antigone-- sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion."

Ah, Dorothea as Antigone. A passionate idealist who would die for her faith, and the gods will side with her, or God, in this case.

CHAPTER XX "A child forsaken, waking suddenly, Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove, And seeth only that it cannot see The meeting eyes of love."

Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

I love this. Don't get all bent out of shape...this is what happens. Illusions are toppled, it's not unusual for a bride to cry. If we felt deeply over this all the time, everything would be as sharp as pins, all the time. We should die of the roar on the other side of silence. The child that wakes suddenly learns from experience, grows up, and learns to move on. This bears pondering.

...she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow--the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.

CHAPTER XXI "Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain, No contrefeted termes had she To semen wise." --CHAUCER.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling-- an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

CHAPTER XXII "Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne. Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien; Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone, Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne, Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien; Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien." --ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Found that translation:

"We talked for a long time; she was simple and kind.
Knowing no evil, she did only good:
She gave me alms from the riches of her heart,
And listening intently as she poured out her heart,
Scarcely daring to think, I gave her mine;
Thus she carried off my life, and never even knew it."

"Une Bonne Fortune," by Alfred de Musset (1834).

Even without translation, we could tell this was about Will falling for Dorothea. With translation, we get insights into his looming love.

pfuscherei? = bungling...Will says Naumann will say this of his painting.

It was beautiful to see how Dorothea's eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr. Casaubon: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been without that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the husband's sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and Will's longing to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the less tormenting because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining it.

...

If he never said a cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left off receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible to hate him the more. The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe; and Will was at least ready with that accomplishment.

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 2, Chapters 13-17

2011-08-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG
I see rather than characters, the Books may instead branch out. Beginning with Miss Brooke, the view is expanded, and we now look toward the people around her. Or maybe it will all end up centering around Dorothea.

CHAPTER XIII 1st Gent. How class your man?--as better than the most, Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak? As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite? 2d Gent. Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books The drifted relics of all time. As well sort them at once by size and livery: Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf Will hardly cover more diversity Than all your labels cunningly devised To class your unread authors.

Hmmm, will the people be classified?

You know Mr. Farebrother?" "I have seen him. He gave me his vote. I must call to thank him. He seems a very bright pleasant little fellow. And I understand he is a naturalist." "Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate. I suppose there is not a clergyman in this country who has greater talents." Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative. "I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in Middlemarch," said Lydgate, bluntly.

Indeed they will, it seems.

Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily at his brother-in-law, meaning to imply a demand for a decisive answer. This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer's mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men; and perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would end.

Wow...it seemed Fred would not get his letter, but Mr. Vincy has his ways. All he needs to do is to imply sisterly wrath.

CHAPTER XIV "Follows here the strict receipt For that sauce to dainty meat, Named Idleness, which many eat By preference, and call it sweet: First watch for morsels, like a hound Mix well with buffets, stir them round With good thick oil of flatteries, And froth with mean self-lauding lies. Serve warm: the vessels you must choose To keep it in are dead men's shoes."

"Your friends would dislike it, and so would mine. My father would think it a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not work!" Fred was stung, and released her hand. She walked to the door, but there she turned and said: "Fred, you have always been so good, so generous to me. I am not ungrateful. But never speak to me in that way again." "Very well," said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip. His complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white. Like many a plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a plain girl, who had no money! But having Mr. Featherstone's land in the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.

Poor Fred, declares his love, and this is what he gets. Is Mary so devoid of feeling, so practical? Or does she challenge Fred to do better than gamble and fritter time away?

CHAPTER XV "Black eyes you have left, you say, Blue eyes fail to draw you; Yet you seem more rapt to-day, Than of old we saw you. "Oh, I track the fairest fair Through new haunts of pleasure; Footprints here and echoes there Guide me to my treasure: "Lo! she turns--immortal youth Wrought to mortal stature, Fresh as starlight's aged truth-- Many-named Nature!"

Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons.

Lydgate is ambitious, and hopes to better his position through his work as a doctor, right? Nothing else holds his interest longer, not even a beautiful woman.

He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

What he had was a young love that turned out to be not so worthy of his attention. I think of it as an inoculation, and he perhaps is now immune to foolish love. Is he also immune to worthy love? Would love fit in his life now?

CHAPTER XVI "All that in woman is adored In thy fair self I find-- For the whole sex can but afford The handsome and the kind." --SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

It was the pleasantest family party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch. The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly impatient of the music.

Yet, Dr. Lydgate tried several times to leave, having a greater interest in the samples of science. He is not wooed by the invitations of the ladies to stay with their amusements.

He thought of Rosamond and her music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.

He is so focused on his objectives that a possible love barely penetrates his mind and heart.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite. Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe at once that Lydgate could be no exception.

Who we love depends on our experiences and our position in society. It was clear Rosamond was predisposed to falling in love with an outsider. Everyone she'd known all her life was too familiar, and too clearly already conquests. She sought an Other, and found him in Dr. Lydgate, and her fantasy is what she saw in him, not him necessarily.

CHAPTER XVII "The clerkly person smiled and said Promise was a pretty maid, But being poor she died unwed."
Who? Who will die unwed? Miss Noble? Who is Miss Noble? I need a character guide. Ahh, Mrs. Farebrother's sister. That would make her the Vicar's aunt. Indeed, she must be an older spinster.

Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit of sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake; looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacup with a small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped. ... Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire.

This struck me as so psychologically astute. I conferred with my co-worker with the History major. Yes, William James came after this. This was first published in 1871. William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890.

So much politics among clergy: Tyke would withhold coal from his parishioners if they went to Farebrother. Farebrother either seems to be above it, or does his politicking by being amiable.

Ah, but he is amiable for another reason perhaps:

The Vicar's frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but simply the relief of a desire to do with as little pretence as possible. Apparently he was not without a sense that his freedom of speech might seem premature, for he presently said-- "I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you, Mr. Lydgate, and know you better than you know me. You remember Trawley who shared your apartment at Paris for some time? I was a correspondent of his, and he told me a good deal about you.

Not only is he amenable to bartering scientific treasures, it seems he hopes to get Dr. Lydgate's talents focused on his documents. ...or back to the politicking idea...he's cultivating Lydgate to get his vote for the chaplaincy at the hospital. In the end he honestly says he could use the money, but doesn't expect he'll get the position. To Lydgate he says...

You are a sort of circumnavigator come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in the antipodes. Now tell me all about them in Paris.

This seems kind of mysterious. Antipodes --> polarities? Why must Farebrother keep up his belief in them? And what about Paris? Would he know from Lydgate's former roommate about the love affair? It seems to be he wishes to lighten the mood by saying this. He's recognizing the tug of war over the chaplaincy, and recognizing Dr. Lydgate may be the one who decides the tug of war.

But somehow I have a feeling there's more to it than this, a foreshadowing. Dr. Lydgate is the one who can travel around this world of Middlemarch, isn't that right? He's an outsider, so can be kind of a referee. He is not really of the poor class, nor is he of the titled class. In a world where the Mrs. Cadwalladers and the Mrs. Farebrothers manipulate the interactions of and negotiations between the classes, Dr. Lydgate can travel freely, being a doctor and a scientist. And Mr. Farebrother's primary interest in him is as a scientist, perhaps not so much as a decider of his fate. Maybe it means nothing, just that the vicar hopes to have a chance thanks to the doctor and the amiability between them. Or, hearkening back to the beginning of this Book, Dr. Lydgate can be a circumnavigator because he has no stake. He hasn't found any great talents, is hardly affected by the charms of the local beauty, and only cares about his work and having the funds to carry it out.

Eastern Oregon Trip: Geiser Grand Hotel

2011-08-29T23:56:00.000-07:00


Photo courtesy of Baker County Library

We were glad to get to Baker City. We stayed at the Geiser Grand Hotel, shown here when it was the Hotel Warshauer.

Whenever I visit a new place I like to check out the library. We were too busy to do so during this mini-vacation, but I did visit the Baker County Library website. They have a great database of historic photos. In addition to the photos, there are accompanying historic articles. This photo, for instance, has an 1898 review of the hotel. "On entering we find that the promise given of elegance in furnishings does not disappoint." It still doesn't.

It was dinner time when we arrived, and we got a glimpse of the dining room. Soon we would return, me for the usual vegetarian option of pasta, but in this case with locally harvested wild mushrooms, and my sweetie for steak. But first, our room. At first I had reserved one of the cheaper rooms without some kind of view. Even the cheaper rooms promised to be better than your usual chain hotel. However, my sweetie had me call the hotel and upgrade to a cupola suite. I had to reveal my ignorance and ask just how you say that. It's an Italian term, so you say coop-oh-la. We were on the second floor in that round corner.

We stayed there two nights...and each morning we ordered room service and sat at that table with the view all around us. Room service is so fun...everybody should have a chance to experience that at least once in their life. Another nice thing...this hotel has a noon checkout time. Even though we didn't stay that long, it was so nice not to have that pressure to be packed up and out by 10 or 11 am, and still have time to have breakfast brought to us.

Our view included the US Bank across the street, which housed the largest Oregon nugget still extant. Sadly, we arrived too late to give that a visit. Banks still stay closed on the weekend in Baker town.

More photos here, including a closer shot of that beautiful skylight.

Eastern Oregon Trip: Pendleton

2011-08-29T01:26:00.000-07:00

I packed quite a lot of plans into this little weekend trip. (Here's a map.) I didn't expect we could do everything, but I was prepared with possibilities depending on our mood. Our stop in Pendleton depended on how our drive along I-84 went, and whether we got a timely start in the morning. Fortunately, the last tour of the day of Pendleton's Underground happens at 2:30 pm, so we didn't have to make it a very early morning start. After about 4 hours of driving, it was a good time to make a stop, anyway. We got there with just enough time to grab some lunch...simple sandwiches across the street...and wait a few minutes for the tour.

Our first stop was a western barroom underground. Oregon had experienced a gold rush later than the California Rush. Our guide told us how bartenders would measure gold dust in payment for drinks, but as they did so, they would spill some grains along the bar. After payment and poured drink, they would swipe it onto the floor with a cloth, and near the end of their shift, would tromp around in the mud, come back behind the bar, then pick up the gold dust off the floor with the mud on their boots. Hmmm, sounds like a good story, but true? Our guide said that's how bartenders got into the habit of wiping down the bar even when not needed. Now that definitely sounds made up, because I thought it was due to health codes. All in good fun. In the same vein, the Chinese laborers would sweep up the barroom floor at the end of the night, and they would get all kinds of gold dust out of their sweepings.

In the same room he pointed out a simple wheel with numbers and pegs, telling us it was donated by Pendleton Woolen Mills. Back in the day, he said, the company would give sellers the opportunity to spin for the price of their wool.

Whenever you're in a Western town or city and see those purple glass squares in a sidewalk, that means there is, or was, tunnels underground there. It's actually magnesium glass prisms. The prisms start out clear, but the sun turns them purple. They're designed to focus and amplify the light in the tunnels. The tunnels are designed to provide one stop for delivery, with individual deliveries to businesses branching out underground, rather than on the busy street. Nothing nefarious about the original intention, despite the legends of Shanghai Tunnels, opium dens, and speakeasies (though it seems these often turned into those). The panels are really beautiful from underneath (right photo). Unfortunately, an inept business destroyed all but two full panels when it rebuilt the streets and sidewalks of Pendleton. They were supposed to put the panels back in the sidewalks when they created the boardwalk style cement, but instead ground up the glass and recycled it. I want to ask, what idiot thought those things weren't worth something?! Or maybe they weren't idiots, and sold the prism panels while saying they accidentally destroyed them?

Also on this tour we saw Hop Sing's Laundry, a recreation of an early Ice Cream shop, an opium den, quarters for Chinese men, along with their Chinese jail, a big stakes poker room, a speakeasy, along with the requisite bullet holes in the tin ceiling, a butcher's shop, along with one of the earliest ice-makers, and a brothel, though the brothel tour was above ground. In reality, the ice cream shop and the butcher shop were above ground, while the production of the foods were below ground, but hey, it's a museum of sorts.

In some cases there was water in the tunnels. Sometimes this was cause for a business to set up shop, like the ice cream makers and the butchers. The butchers dug a pit in their tunnel, filled it with brine water they cooled with ammonia compression (who knew this was used for early refrigeration?), and fresh water was placed in tall metal containers. They then sold the ice.

Our guide told us he was sad to learn of this when he took this job, that there were sundown laws in Oregon. No person of color could be on the city's streets after sundown. This was why the Chinese men (only Chinese men were allowed to emigrate to the US, not women) lived in the tunnels. Their "Chinese jails" were for each other...to keep someone from going above to get some air. If he did, he could be shot by the whites, and the shooter would not be charged.

As I search around, I find this was an "unwritten law." While Oregon was not a slave state, it was indeed written into law that Blacks could not settle here (exclusion laws), and these "sundown laws" seem to be an extension of that racist institutionalization. (Let me just say, if I haven't already, that an MCL card holder can access all of the Oregonian's archives, as well as JSTOR, where one can access many journals, images, letters, and other primary sources. Included in JSTOR, Oregon Historical Quarterly.)

According to our guide, up until 1953, there were 18 brothels and 32 bars in Pendleton. That all ended when a new minister came to town, didn't like the sin of the city, and observed the brothels to take names and force the city to close all the brothels down. Gotta love morality by coercion. There are still many upper stories of buildings, he pointed out, that are closed up, sealed since the day the prostitutes were sent out of town. The one we toured had only been unsealed in recent years, revealing many belongings that were never retrieved.

One madame stuck around, sneaking back into town. We learned that unlike other brothel managers, she treated her girls well: she covered all their expenses; paid them 50/50; and taught them life skills so they could move on from the business, even get married. Madame Stella would tour the town with a wagon load of groceries for the down and out, and have a visiting minister give sermons in her brothel so her employees could also convene with God because, of course, they weren't allowed in churches. Her funeral, our guide said, was the second-most-attended in Pendleton's history, after the sheriff who was killed in the line of duty.

The rest of the photos, and more of the story, can be found here. The whole tour took an hour and a half.

Madame Stella Darby

Odds n Ends

2011-08-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

A few things kept me from the writing I intended, but I hope to do some catching up this weekend. Here's what kept me busy...

First of all, my sweetie and I took a 3-day, 2-night trip to Eastern Oregon. Photos are here...more details to come. We packed a lot into those 3 days. Then there was sifting through nearly 500 photos and editing the ones I chose. I never would have taken that many photos in the days of film. Now, rather than stand for 5 minutes and read a placard, I can take a photo and read it later.

Some people scoff at the constant taking of photos, but I find it doesn't necessarily separate me from what I am experiencing because a view screen allows me to put the camera anywhere, as opposed to the view-finder forcing me to put the camera right in front of my face. The photos even allow me to see details I might not have otherwise. This allows me to experience a place, preserve it for memories and future learning without getting all worn and bedraggled because I stood around reading all those signs. There will be more posts to come on our trip, and more updating of those photos.

Yesterday I finally drank some mint tea brewed from leaves harvested from my front yard, sharing it with my best friend. I spent several evenings on that harvest...that'll teach me to procrastinate in the future. The Julep Spearmint was most fecund, and if anything needed to be cut back just to stop it from encroaching on the path to our door. Next to it, the Chocolate Mint, also quite healthy but not quite as weedish, also had bolted. Last thing I want is for those flowers' seeds to jump the concrete and asphalt and start growing everywhere.

I cut back those belly-high stalks of mint, and laid them out on a sheet to dry in the yard. We were having warm, dry weather, so I figured it would take 1-2 days to dry, which it did. Then I stripped the leaves, and avoided the flowers. This made it a much longer task. Next year I'll be better about harvesting earlier and more often, especially the chocolate mint, as it smelled more chocolaty earlier in the season. Still, the brew was better than I expected, so what was I waiting for?

Meanwhile, my baby roses are thriving, and some rose hips are ripe...certainly riper than my tomatoes. I'm still getting new flowers, too. The nursery where I bought them has some recipes for jam, puree, and tea. Here's a forum where someone posted even more recipes.

Some tomatoes are finally turning color. It looks like I will have at least 2 kinds. A friend gave me several starts from her heirloom seeds...what I get is the luck of the draw. I'm glad, because I like both the green stripey ones and the red or orange ones

Slow Read: Middlemarch Book 1

2011-08-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

Well...I'm a week behind with my posting, but only a day behind with my reading. I do have a niggling worry about how I am going to fit in the reading of another thick book for my other book group: Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel.

PRELUDE

Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life... Her flame...soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order. ...Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

Is this the theme of the book?

BOOK I. MISS BROOKE

CHAPTER I "Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it. --The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. ...Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?

I'm so glad I came across the etiquette explanation that the first-born young lady is always "Miss so-and-so" and the younger sisters are referred to by their first names. I think I learned this while attending a play adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. At first I thought the book is about these two, then I remembered the title. There's going to be a lot to keep track of, this being about the whole fictional town of Middlemarch. Perhaps each Book will be focused on a particular character.

CHAPTER II `Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' `What I see,' answered Sancho, `is nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.' `Just so,' answered Don Quixote: `and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.'

I see it looks like there will be a quote for every chapter. What does it mean? Does it set the tone? Does it explain Everything? Is it like the song in a musical...expressing the emotional underpinnings? I'm afraid I could make this very complex, or maybe the author made it very complex.

Long story short: Sir James likes Miss Brooke. Miss Brooke's uncle and guardian likes Sir James for Miss Brooke. Celia knows Sir James likes Miss Brooke. Miss Brooke has no clue Sir James likes her, nor would she care. She thinks Sir James likes Celia. Miss Brooke likes the old quasi-holy man, Mr. Casaubon, whom she just met. So...Miss Brooke = Don Quixote, and Celia = the more reality-based Sancho? Sir James thinks Miss Brooke likes him back.

CHAPTER III "Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael, The affable archangel . . . Eve The story heard attentive, and was filled With admiration, and deep muse, to hear Of things so high and strange." --Paradise Lost, B. vii.

Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies' school literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.

Miss Dorothea Brooke is smitten. Who is Bossuet? There's a lot to look up in this book.

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir James's illusion. "He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot bear notions." ...Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait, and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness.

Celia has more tact than I. I am beginning to get impatient with Miss Brooke's blindness to the feelings of others. Isn't this going overboard? Then the author seems to read my thoughts...

It is difficult to say whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in relation to her. But her life was just now full of hope and action: she was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned books from the library and reading many things hastily...

CHAPTER IV 1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. 2d Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world That brings the iron.

In which Mr. Brooke informs Miss Brooke of Sir James' intentions, and Miss Brooke tells him she wants a wise man who guides her, not one she could boss. I wonder, does she know herself, and I think Mr. Brooke wonders the same thing, but he is a good man, and allows her her choices.

CHAPTER V "Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dry, ill-colored . . . and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will not believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and Thomas Aquainas' works; and tell me whether those men took pains."--BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.

Dorothea sees only what she wants in the letter proposing marriage. This is how it goes, blinded by love. Celia can see more clearly.

When she spoke there was a tear gathering. "Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy." Her sisterly tenderness could not but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the fears of affection.

CHAPTER VI My lady's tongue is like the meadow blades, That cut you stroking them with idle hand. Nice cutting is her function: she divides With spiritual edge the millet-seed, And makes intangible savings.

I wonder where this quote is from? Of course Google yields only Middlemarch. Same from a poetry database...so is this a poem by Eliot for the book? The busybody Mrs. Cadwallader warns Sir James, so he has the chance to save face...

Perhaps his face had never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he turned to Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, "Casaubon?" "Even so. You know my errand now." "Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!"

...and to set his sights toward another, with her suggestion...

However, if I were a man I should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone.

While the beginning quote of a chapter seems to set the tone, the final sentence is like the musical note that defines the whole previous piece.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others.

CHAPTER VII "Piacer e popone Vuol la sua stagione." --Italian Proverb.

Google translate tells me it means "Pleasure and melon Does his season," but says if I mean "Vuole" it means "Pleasure and melon wants his season."

Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much more readily.

Just as I thought. Eliot crafts her characters well.

CHAPTER VIII "Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now, And you her father. Every gentle maid Should have a guardian in each gentleman."

Final note:

Hence it happened that in the good baronet's succeeding visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

Hmmm. Now that the whole issue of infatuation is out of the way, is this setting the stage for future true love? But then she will be married to the wrong man! But then, if the beginning quote steers us right, Sir James will be more like a brother to Dorothea.

CHAPTER IX 1st Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles Is called "law-thirsty": all the struggle there Was after order and a perfect rule. Pray, where lie such lands now? . . . 2d Gent. Why, where they lay of old--in human souls.

CHAPTER X "He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed."--FULLER.

Aaaarrggh. I need annotations. Where does this come from? Why is this quote so different in flavor? In this chapter we meet a young cousin of Mr. Casaubon, Will. The narrator inserts herself, saying it's too soon to tell of the conceit of Will, but "this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin."

CHAPTER XI "But deeds and language such as men do use, And persons such as comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes." --BEN JONSON.

CHAPTER XII "He had more tow on his distaffe Than Gerveis knew." --CHAUCER.

OK, this I found. It's in The Miller's Tale. Long story short, an assistant gets it on with the old carpenter's young wife, and a clerk also wants the carpenter's wife. Gerveis is the smithy from whom the clerk gets a hot poker to revenge himself on the wife, who rejected the clerk. The smithy jokes about the clerk's women troubles, and the clerk is thinking 'oh if only you knew...'

So this chapter is about the young Fred having to jump through hoops to keep in good graces with his manipulative rich uncle, Mr. Featherstone.

It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode's name in the matter was a fiction of old Featherstone's; nor could this have made any difference to his position. He saw plainly enough that the old man wanted to exercise his power by tormenting him a little, and also probably to get some satisfaction out of seeing him on unpleasant terms with Bulstrode. Fred fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone's soul, though in reality half what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations.

Meanwhile, Fred's sister Rosamond, meets the eyes of the new man in town, Dr. Lydgate, a moment that "seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze."

Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.

Schedule

August 14-20: Prelude, and Book One: Miss Brooke
August 21-27: Book Two: Old and Young
August 28-September 3: Book Three: Waiting for Death
September 4-10: Book Four: Three Love Problems
September 11-17: Book Five: The Dead Hand
September 18-24: Book Six: The Widow and the Wife
September 25-October 1: Book Seven: Two Temptations
October 2-8: Book Eight: Sunset and Sunrise; and Finale

Announcing a Slow Read

2011-08-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

My library is overflowing with book groups. In addition to the one I facilitate, mixed fiction and non-fiction chosen by the regular attendees, and the non-fiction one that's been around awhile, there will be a new Classics Pageturners. Rather than staff facilitating this one, regular attendees will volunteer to facilitate. As I have been wanting this particular book group for a long time, I plan to attend regularly, even though it will always meet on the third Sunday, and the group I facilitate always meets on the third Tuesday. I will have to take care to plan my book-reading.

One book I have been intending to read for a loooooong time...ever since I heard it has been on my alma mater's reading list, but wasn't when I attended Santa Fe, is Middlemarch by George Eliot. The Classics Pageturners group will be reading it for October, and I've volunteered to facilitate. (and I'll be a good example) You know, don't you, that Middlemarch is a gazillion pages long? This is perfect for a slow read with blogging, as it will take a long time to read anyway, and I would have to reflect and write notes just in self-defense in any case.

It has 1088 pages, is broken up into 8 books, and 86 chapters. I will read a book a week, starting next week. I hope there will be people inclined to join me in the slow read, whether you live in Portland and plan to attend the book group, or are a fellow alumn, or just because you've always meant to read it too. Reading it slow reduces the pressure of a thick book, and great books like this are better savored, and shared. It's available free for the Kindle and online thanks to Project Gutenberg.

August 14-20: Prelude, and Book One: Miss Brooke
August 21-27: Book Two: Old and Young
August 28-September 3: Book Three: Waiting for Death
September 4-10: Book Four: Three Love Problems
September 11-17: Book Five: The Dead Hand
September 18-24: Book Six: The Widow and the Wife
September 25-October 1: Book Seven: Two Temptations
October 2-8: Book Eight: Sunset and Sunrise; and Finale

Incidentally, I will also be doing another slow read of sorts...I will be co-leading a class with my friend and Buddhist priest Domyo, on Soto Zen, a book by our Zen Center's founding father, Keido Chisan. The first class will be September 14. Domyo and I need to get cracking on our planning. Free pdf here.

Landscaping progress

2011-08-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

The plans I had for the front yard edible landscaping are fulfilled.

The bird bath, acquired from Amazon for less than 20 bucks completed the plan. There may be new additions in the future, but those will be refinements. Now it is a matter of waiting for plants to grow to their full potential.

Stan, the builder of the wall, is looking out for me. He found some great assorted rocks and fossils at a yard sale, and brought them back for me. Next to the birdbath is a large piece of obsidian. He also planted this oregano now crazy with purple blooms. He "had plenty."

I ordered my roses from a Wisconsin nursery, as I was looking for Rugosas, and Spring Valley Roses made it very easy for me to find the type and the expected bush size I was looking for. They arrived in April. These smell nice and produce large, and tastier, rose hips. I could make rose hip tea, or even jelly. I didn't expect much the first year, but I got several blooms on each baby bush, though not all at the same time. Here they are at the beginning of July.

From left to right:

Charles Albanel
Snow Pavement
Foxi
Fru Dagmar Hastrup
Purple Pavement
Fru Dagmar....and the rest a mirror image of the left

I decided the order based on size and alternating lighter and darker colors. You can find more photos here, including a ladybug on the new green rose leaves. Look for the rhubarb...yes...I got rhubarb! A facebook (and co-worker) friend announced she was giving some away this spring. Next year I will likely be able to harvest.

Be a Superhero at Kickstarter

2011-07-21T01:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Facebook, I've come across Kickstarter and a couple of businesses I'm really happy to see get going in Portland.

The first was plugged by the coffee shop across the street from my library, Jazzkats. I supported Heidi Ho Organics not because I'm vegetarian, though I like to choose vegan options when I can, but more because of the name. Kinda required, don'tya think?

Lately, I've been all about the food carts. Innovative, creative food, cheap, and a lot of choice when you go to the pods. Who cares if it's raining during this summer-long Portland winter? We've got cart pods with tents and heat. There are 3 pods in walking distance of my house, and another mini-pod. This one, Alacarts, has my favorite veggie burger place, Off the Griddle. Not only are they all about the vegetarian, they have all renewable energy, including their own solar panels.

So now, comfort food as finger food. Mmmm. Plus Steampunk. At a cart pod hopefully near me. It may be a little light on the vegetarian options, but I have faith, and the baker is focusing on locally grown ingredients. I'm supporting them; why don't you watch this video, then be a superhero and help them get started too.

Hopefully the feature in the freely delivered Food Day will also get her more donations at Kickstarter...only about 20 days left.

Oh...if you make a donation and comment here, I will raise my donation by $5 for each of you who does so.

Queen, Princess, or Butch?

2011-07-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

I joined a friend for her monthly Ladies' Night Out, and enjoyed getting to know some great people. There were some stories of dating, and how the single ladies could meet people. The experiences that rose to my mind from my past were too risque for me to share on a first meeting. The stories began as one lady shared her recent experience of getting too many phone calls from an irate wife over a man she'd met who'd claimed to be divorced. These are the hazards women must face when dating people they don't know. We spent much time talking about how we married types could play matchmaker for our single friends.

Near the end my friend referred back to her calling herself a princess, but really, she thinks of herself as a queen, joking. (I'd be happy to treat her as a queen.) As I picked up my Red Tango purse with cat logo, I said "You wouldn't think so considering my purse and all my rhinestones, but I think of myself as butch, so not a princess." Expressions of disbelief, of course. I found myself reflecting on this. Internally, I really don't see myself as feminine, and I had to think more about why that is.

Externally, I do sport some feminine things: rhinestone eyeglasses and pins; a small pink purse; skirts, never pants; long hair. It was even more difficult to defend my butch feeling last night, as the skirt I wore was not my usual plain denim, and my long hair was held up with a hair clip showcasing more rhinestones. There are other aspects about myself that are more butch, though, and while I think of the rhinestones as fun accessories, I think of my other more butch tendencies as more fundamental to me.

I am not much of a clothes fashionista. I pretty much take what I can get, so this may be accidental karma. As a fat woman, I don't have much choice...though these days I have much more available than decades past. I've never liked frilly, and it's pretty rare that I will choose a print over a solid color. I think of my plain denim skirt as my "jeans." I find it more comfortable and a better look for my body type than actual jeans, so I still think of my skirt as butch...that and my normal footwear are Ecco boots. These were not in evidence last night, as my friend had invited us to "dress up" if we wished. Instead, I wore my closest to dress up shoes, my trip-hazardly Danskos. Oh, and I never wear makeup, nor a bra.

Those are the externals, but I find myself intrigued by what I think of as my internal feeling of being butch, despite my crow-like attraction to sparklies. Aside from fashion, this is a larger question, of gender identity. The men I like have high emotional intelligence, can keep up a meandering conversation, are around my height, no taller, are about as smart as me. My sweetie is a bear type, of the dark-haired variety, certainly what I find attractive, but I also often find the androgynous look very attractive. Among women, I find the feminine look attractive, but for me to admire, not to be. I communicate directly, don't do well with hints, or hint much myself. I've never been interested in being supported, but to make my own way. I could be wrong, but I think of these things as more butch than femme.

Some of my internal feeling cannot be separated from how I am responded to by others. As a lifelong fat person, I am rarely flirted with. When there is sexual tension, or that rare flirting, I tend to be forward and direct. Rather than getting or expecting to get the admiration, I am free with the compliments. I'll let the queen know just how beauteous she is.

Maybe what it comes down to is at heart I find gender identity a construct. When I unfold the layers, when I find me at the core, I just am. Not feminine, not masculine. And what is the default? Masculine. Which gender historically has choice, drive, independence, objectivity? Masculine. That's not really what makes one masculine or feminine, but that is what we inherit, and after digging, and finding my core identity to be about equal footing, I begin to see this is why I'd tip my identity more to the masculine side, and I begin to see how silly it is to try to pin down a true gender identity. Maybe it's better to keep it a joke. Of course I am a queen too! Do my bidding, good subjects.

On Movement, Mirrors, and Recognition

2011-06-22T23:52:00.001-07:00

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Some books are made greater by discussion. I wasn't too sure about how I felt about Elegance of the Hedgehog when I finished. It reminded me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so my first thought was, is this a European thing?

Let me say I was immediately charmed by the philosophical analysis not usually expected of such characters. Indeed, Madame Marcel appears to thrive on her secret internal existence. Externally visible as a frumpy, dull concierge, in her private rooms she finds sustenance from the finer efforts of the human brain.

As it is not terribly common to come across a concierge waxing ecstatic over Death in Venice or to hear strains of Mahler wafting from her loge, I delved into my hard-earned conjugal savings and bought a second television set that I could operate in my hideaway. Thus, the television in the front room, guardian of my clandestine activities, could bleat away and I was no longer forced to listen to inane nonsense fit for the brain of a clam—I was in the back room, perfectly euphoric, my eyes filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art.

Her mirror, a 12 year old girl too wise for her own good (she plans to commit suicide, having already reduced her existence logically to a nihilistic existentialism), sees into the crafty concierge:

As for Madame Michel . . . how can we tell? She radiates intelligence. And yet she really makes an effort, like, you can tell she is doing everything she possibly can to act like a concierge and come across as stupid. ...Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary—and terribly elegant.

The best thing about this book are the amazingly insightful sentences. Hey...I'm no slouch when it comes to the vocabulary, but I was checking the dictionary often (these are the times when one loves the Kindle). Just check out this dig:

...enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hard-core autism that no real cat would ever importune.

The cats are mostly related to Tolstoy, if their names are anything to go by.

The first thing mentioned at our book group was that we had to talk about the ending...but to get there we had to backtrack and figure out the characters. Just what did being a hedgehog mean? Let's review phenomenology, and how the understanding of it is affected by the haphazard studies of an autodidactic. Let's make sure we understand the insight about movement and people as mirrors by Paloma, the 12 year old, who sees a hedgehog because she herself is one. Finally, in one of those best moments of a book discussion group, as we're still trying to fulfill the Meaning of It All, I ask, a natural question in the flow of the conversation, I ask, "Is this book about Recognition?" One of the others asks, "You mean of one character to another?" "Not just that, but recognition with a capital R...recognition of movement, recognition of ritual, recognition of a hedgehog..." This question was met with enthusiasm, so I think we got to the heart of it.

I didn't say, didn't need to, but I was also thinking of our Zen Buddist Recognition Ceremony. There were definitely some Zen moments in this book. The third main character, more mysterious as we don't get first-hand thoughts from him, was Japanese. To me, this Recognition of the eternal nature of another, this is the essence of this book. Once you get a handle on that, the mysteries sort of fall into place, and it becomes a much better book, rather than simply a cryptic one.

My Talk on Sharing the Dharma

2011-06-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

On the insistence of the other members of the planning committee, I was one of three people in the Discussion Panel at the Buddhist Festival in the Park, themed Sharing the Dharma. Given that I talked in part about sharing the Dharma with children, it's kind of appropriate that the only photo that I personally took that day was of the altar some girls arranged in the Children's Pavilion. I'd given them an impromptu short lesson on how they could bring anything important to them to their own personal altar.

I didn't ad lib from my written speech, except when I apologized for my phone ringing. This was of course embarrassing, as well as funny because I almost never set the phone to ring...only to vibrate...but this day I set it to ring, as it might be important if someone tried to reach me while we were setting up for the festival. I am hardly ever in this position...at the front of an audience. There were a few women in the audience who really made me glad to be there. They were listening, and showing their appreciation with nods and smiles. One woman in particular had such an encouraging smile that I had to go say hi afterward and thank her. It made me realize that there is such a thing as a good audience member. When someone gives a talk, it goes both ways.

Here's my talk:

I want to talk about three aspects of Sharing the Dharma. We have many different Buddhist traditions here today, and each emphasizes a different aspect of the Dharma, perhaps even contradictory aspects, so I will talk a little about what we all share in common. Also, I want to talk about how we Buddhists tend to share the Dharma, without evangelizing, and I want to talk about sharing the Dharma with children.

People often ask me, “What makes you a Buddhist?” Even if we try to answer this, we will find different traditions have different promises you make. Most often called the precepts, these promises can range from 5 to 16, and many more for ordained monastics. How these precepts are treated can vary as well, ranging from personal guidelines, to somewhat rigid rules, to rules one commits to for a limited time. I have heard of some traditions where you commit to the precepts you’re sure you can keep.

However, there is one thing we share across traditions, across methods, whether lay or monastic, whatever country, and that is that we take refuge in the 3 jewels, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. I have managed to sound wise to my non-religious friends by saying that it seems to me these are 3 aspects you will find in any spiritual framework, if you think of the Buddha as the teacher, the Dharma as the teachings, and the Sangha as the community with which we share this refuge.

I take that back…even these will have differences. In some traditions, Sangha can only mean a community of 5 monks, whereas in others it can mean anyone or even anything you share a spiritual refuge with. Some people find their refuge in the community of mountains, trees, rocks, and streams, and in my Zen tradition we would say those mountains, trees, rocks, and streams are sangha to those folks.

Still, in the traditional sense, we find refuge in the historical Buddha, in the Dharma teachings that have flowed forth from that Buddha, and the Sangha community that has supported this flow down through the ages. We find this triple jewel to be our spiritual home.

Many of us who have converted to Buddhism come to it in part because it is a religion that for the most part doesn’t try to convert you. In some cases, we like it because it seems not to be a religion, as we don’t worship a god. For the most part, we want it to be a choice, freely made. In my experience in Zen, we might even say, “Don’t do this for this or that reason.” We might say, “Don’t start unless you are prepared to take this on for life.” In many cases, we do this because we must. An eternal question has made itself felt in our lives, and Buddhism seems to have the tools to respond to it. Then, we Buddhists won’t say, “Have faith. Believe.” Instead, we will say, “OK, give it a try. Your experience will show you this is the right path.” This is our faith. We are ok with somewhat different paths pointing to a universal experience.

This eternal question is the manifestation of the 4 Noble Truths, another piece of the Dharma we all share. We seek out this path because something about our life is unsatisfactory. Truth number 1: Life is marked by dukkha, or suffering, or unsatisfactoriness. Truth number 2: We’re not talking about the simple pain of broken bones or a sore throat, we’re talking about that extra grasping we do. We don’t just feel the pain, we really want that pain to GO AWAY. We’re talking about the clinging, the grasping we do to have life be a certain way. This is how life is…seems like a bad thing…but without this grasping, would we seek out an answer to that eternal question? Would we seek a way out?

That brings us to Truth number 3: There is indeed a way out of this grasping and craving. Here is where you find our Buddhist faith. We trust those who have gone before, the Buddha, those teachers who have said, yes, I’ve been through this, and I’ve experienced this way out. Still, we say, “Find out for yourself.”

Finally, those buddhas who have gone before tell us this is the way out: truth number 4: The Eightfold Path.

Different traditions may focus on different aspects of the Eightfold Path, but we all agree this is a template for a path out of suffering. Some paths may emphasize a sudden realization, some a long slow integration, but however we understand it, we find the Eightfold Path integrated into various aspects of our teachings. [[Wisdom: 1. Right View 2. Right Intention Ethical Conduct: 3. Right Speech 4. Right Action 5. Right Livelihood. Mental Development: 6. Right Effort 7. Right Mindfulness 8. Right Concentration]]

Woven through all those “Rights” in the eightfold path is an understanding of the Middle Way. What does “Right” mean for you? The Buddha found his Middle Way between the comforts of a prince and the deprivations of an asthetic. What is the “Right” way for us to live in this modern world? Again, our different traditions will have a different response to this. Even within our respective communities, we will have different teachers who have different styles of response. Without a casual response, with thoughtfulness, we each will have a Middle Way, and we each will have a choice. With each moment, we have the opportunity to find the Right response, this is the path we keep choosing, this choosing is the way out of the dissatisfactoriness.

I have noticed over the years that converts are particularly enthusiastic about sharing their religion. During the early years, I learned that in my enthusiasm I could tell a person much more than she really wanted to hear. A polite question about my religion of choice did not mean a person wanted to know about the basic teachings, or go to a workshop on how to meditate. I learned to respond to the specific question, and offer no more. If someone really wanted to know, a conversation would begin.

I loved that I could make this choice, and I remembered my childhood in which I did not have a choice. Ironically, I was allowed to stop going to my United Methodist church only after my “confirmation.” After I was confirmed, I kept going to church after all, and I now realize that I stayed because I found refuge in the community, and because the community accepted me, I accepted the teachings. Later, as I uncovered my own notions of what I believed, I realized I had not been given a choice as a child. I had been coerced. I had been taught religious opinions as though they were facts and laws of nature as tangible as stones and erosion. As I now was able to make this choice, so I now felt it was so very important that each person be allowed to make their own choices. I cringed at the documentary “Devil’s Playground.” What choice do these Amish teens have, when set loose at 16 to experience the world, when they have been taught from babies that if they do not choose their church, they will go to hell?

Now you find me here, helping people to find this refuge. You find me teaching children about the Dharma, for over a dozen years now. I tread lightly. There is much in the teachings that can be shaped for children, but I treat myths and legends as myths and legends. I say “Some people say” or “some find it useful to understand it this way.” Even with 5 year olds, this works. They, more than all of us, understand story. They live story. They accept story as real, whether we say it’s a story or not. When they get older, with the skepticism of a growing brain, they won’t look back and think, “it’s all untrue” because from the very beginning we gave them the choice.

For example, for children’s Jukai, or taking of the precepts, we use the 3 refuges and 2 promises from Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition, and we tell the kids, “This is a promise that is only for this year. Next year you can take the promises again. If you don’t feel like making these promises is something for you, you don’t have to, you can keep silent. You can wait til next year.” Some kids do just that. Still, we can’t avoid all coercion. When it is a child’s first year at Jukai, they get to choose a mala, and it’s no surprise, most want that mala made for kids. Enticements may be a form of coercion, but it’s a pretty mild form.

So on the one hand choice is important, on the other hand, it is the nature of kids, and all humans, to have a deep need for shared stories and connection through ritual, and well, tangible stuff. Through the shelter of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, we find these needs met. Most important of these needs, I think, is kind attention and acceptance. Through this path, through the original need that came from dissatisfaction, if we can embrace a self-acceptance so complete, so profound that this self doesn’t matter, then all selves matter. Then the Right paths can happen not because we make an effort, but because the rightness falls into place because it is not for this self, but for all selves, that we tread this path.

Obsessions vs. Goals

2011-06-10T22:38:00.001-07:00

Books read January 2009 to May 31, 2009 (pre-Kindle): 25
Books read January 2011 to May 31, 2011: 71

The Kindle hasn't just re-ignited my love of reading books. It's made me obsessed. (Now as low as $114 new.)

Latest obsession: Rachel Caine. I began reading her Morganville Vampires series on May 5th. I finished with her latest, #10, on May 19. Now I've begun her Weather Warden series.

Other obsessions: Charlaine Harris...her other-than-Sookie-Stackhouse books; Cate Tiernan (I actually had to Inter-Library Loan a book from her Balefire series, the only one that wasn't available on the Kindle); and um...paranormal erotica. mmmm werewolves. The only time growly males in romances are interesting.

Kindle cover pictured was a Christmas present to me from my sweetie's other sweetie. She commissioned it from an Etsy seller.

There's that, and then it seems my obsession over books leaked over into TV obsessions. My sweetie bought us a new TV and Tivo with the new year, and along with that we finally subscribed to Netflix, streaming only. If I started watching a TV show that interested me, I watched and watched until all caught up. This happened with Monarch of the Glen; the Doctor Whoniverse; Jekyll (seeing a pattern here?); and Gossip Girl (library DVDs).

Total fluff, total fun. Not really conducive to writing.

I want to set up some goals, and I hope you, dear readers (if I have any left), can help me to keep on task.

I'll write at least one post here a week. More would be better, but would be hindered by number 2, below. Readers' task: leave a comment about those kinds of posts you've liked best. When I sputtered to a crawling stop, I'd kind of devolved into mostly book-blogging, and I want to get back to the Multiplicity that this blog is all about.
I'll catch up on my Dharma School blogging before we start teaching again in September. I've been postponing for 2 1/2 years. That's somewhere around 20 lessons to write up. Approximately two a week, here we go! Unfortunately, with some of these, I won't have the fun details that came up in the lessons...but then, that means I should be able to write them quickly.
At the very least I'll blog about the books I read for a book group. For now that's one per month. Starting in the fall we'll have our Classics book group, so then it will often be two per month. Unfortunately, the Classics Pageturners is on the third Sunday of each month, and my regular Pageturners is on the third Tuesday of the month. Here again is where the Kindle comes in handy...very easy to review passages I've highlighted. I'll have to schedule my book-reading. Maybe I'll do a slow-read series once in a while again.
Pick up that novel-in-progress again, and write it. I think someone needs to set me up in a hermit's cabin with electricity but NO INTERWEBS.

On Zen Teachers and Students Part 2

2011-03-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

Eric Storlie mentioned in his piece that Eido Shimano Roshi's behavior was known, and documented in Robert Aitken Roshi's papers which surfaced after his death. Storlie says

In forty-six years of Zen practice I’ve observed Asian (and now Western) swamis, tulkus, roshis, rishis, dharma heirs, lineage holders, and masters of various stripes, as well as their disciples, explain that the master’s fiscal extravagance, alcoholism, cruelty, sex addiction, violence, and even rape is – of all things – "a teaching!"

Perhaps. Certainly the Age of Aquarius is marked by sexism in the guise of sexual freedom. I wonder if he judges the present based on his experience decades ago. I also wonder if it is more ambiguous, as I think about how to write a document that says, "Take care." I have contact with many leaders in my area, and I respect many of them. Some I have reservations about. I know for a fact that one did have an affair with a student. (I did not have reservations about him.) I suspect another who has other obvious issues with sexism, not to mention authority, and simple courtesy. The problem is not Transmission, but this Wild West infancy of American Buddhism. Anyone can hang up a shingle and call themselves a professional priest. Most people encountering Buddhism won't know anything about certifications and qualifications.

What I have to be concerned about is more subtle. People seeking a new spiritual direction encounter kind and generous people, and they also encounter predatory people. Myoan Grace Schireson's husband Kuzan Peter Schireson penned a comprehensive article on this that went along with my thinking: it's not just about sex, it's complex, and it can include vulnerability to cults. He makes several points, drawing on the International Cultic Association website What is often considered good medicine in Buddhism can easily turn bad: respect for the teacher turning into unquestioning subservience; or letting go and leaving home turning into isolation and loss of autonomy.

Peter said, and I'd been thinking along these lines:

What I’m suggesting is that it might be useful to consider every spiritual community, every Zen sangha, as a cult risk. Human tendencies in this direction are strong. Societies and groups develop hierarchical structures and the impulse to endow leaders with special traits and powers seems hard to resist, arising from deep socio-biological roots. And these impulses are especially dangerous when a leader himself (or herself) – often an ambitious person despite other good intentions – is pulling for adulation and power.

I'd say these impulses are so strong even when a teacher isn't pulling for adulation and power, the students give it to them, and especially because they are good people, and modest, such teachers don't realize how isolated they themselves are in their opinions and views, because few disagree with them.

Later, Myoan Grace Schireson added a vital piece to the discussion.

So to study this problem. I propose we consider all three levels: personal, interpersonal and transpersonal. We cannot just say that these problems occur because of “bad actors” or sociopathic teachers– there are far too many similar situations to call these problems anomalous. We need to carefully study how all parts work together to intoxicate the Zen sangha and to enable a misguided teacher to harm its members. This is not about blaming teachers, but it is about making sanghas safer for practitioners through education and self-reflection—both outstanding attributes of Buddhist practice.

Things don't always start out this way, but thanks to the heady dynamics of spiritual intimacy, this pattern can easily happen.

In my own experience, and in those I have witnessed, I must say Myoan's third category to examine, the transpersonal or spiritual level, is very important. This Buddhist practice of meditation and examination opens up areas of our beings long held constrained. It is quite natural as barriers and boundaries dissolve, to feel love arise. I suspect perhaps this may very often first manifest as falling in love in someone in particular. It is compelling. It would be difficult to turn away from, to say no to. Such a connection feels too Big to ignore or wait for, yet if a love cannot go through a reasonable waiting period while such conditions of teacher and student are dissolved, perhaps it is not Big enough to be a lasting love. In ordinary cases it arises between peers, and it is almost becoming a standard form in my community for young ordained to take time off from monk training to develop a newly found love interest.

Myoan says

It is not difficult to mistake spiritual energy for sexual energy, physical attraction or even human love. In fact, spiritual energy may be one of the bases for human attraction. We may not in fact be able to truly distinguish the differences between these energies, but the fact of their (simultaneous) existence needs to be clearly understood.

I would go so far as to say, why separate them? This cosmic goop of interconnection is what love comes from, what spiritual uplifting comes from, indeed what attraction comes from. My teacher has often said that even the most heinous acts, such as murder, arise from this wish for not-two. But, simple as the love impulse may be, repercussions (aka karma) are complex, thus the ethical rules.

I could see how a priest or other clergy leader could experience this once, discover the powerfully heady emotions, and seek it again and again, soaking up the excitement and the power. I could see also how, because rules say it is wrong, and because we as repressed Americans are already poorly equipped to manage sexual feelings, that a clergy leader could be caught in this trap in spite of themselves, because they only have (poor) tools for abstention, not tools for management of these feelings.

So....

Legitimacy
Guidelines on boundaries
How to recognize cult-like dynamics
How to understand personal and interpersonal dynamics of the spiritual quest

These are the things I need to list and hone.

Oh! How did I get this far and not mention my own community's ethics document? I'm sure I've got some specifics I can glean from there.

On Zen Teacher and Student Behavior

2011-03-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

This first quarter of this year has been marked by teacher/student sex scandals in the Zen world. I've been following Sweeping Zen on Facebook, and at least a dozen responses to these events from various American teachers have appeared there. For a couple of years I've intended to create a document for the Buddhist Festival in the Park that would say that a group's participation at the festival does not necessarily mean an endorsement by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and here are some warning signs, etc. Considering this is on the minds of folks in the Buddhist world, it's about time I followed through with this intent. I'm sure I'll have plenty of material to glean from these many articles, including some from psychologists who are also teachers.

For now, I'm going to try to collect my thoughts, so this may take several posts.

One person's response is to do away with Dharma Transmission. Here was my response at the time:

I think Storlie mistakes the form for human nature. It doesn't matter what form it takes, human nature will bring about problems with power, authority, and institutional practices. The fairy tale is not dharma transmission, the fairy tale... is the archetypal transmission of power we humans give others. Take away dharma transmission, and we will insist on filling the void with new corruptible practices. Whether a 10 year institution, or a 1,000 year institution, diligence will always be required against this tendency to corrupt veneration and trust, no matter how pure the intent. Plus, no matter how you try to clear the slate, karma will still remain. Horrific things have been done while trying to ignore this. The Protestant Reformation quickly corrupted. Erase the tsars, create new despots among all the communist equals. Does it help or hurt for those of less corruptible intent to boycott the institutions? Personally I think it hurts more when something is erased and the void is left to be filled by ignorance. There are plenty of charlatans out there who refuse the institution of dharma transmission for their own gain.

A couple of days later, a Zen teacher and psychologist responded with an argument quite similar to mine. (Hmmm...yes...it is quite likely she saw my post...glad I could help.)

Aside from the question of sex with teachers, there is the question of legitimacy, and power and authority that needs to be addressed. This is a huge topic, a morass of spiritual aspiration, heart entanglement, psychology, and ethical guidelines that attempt to put harnesses on this mixture of lofty and base predilections of this human animal.

I guess what has triggered my procrastination pattern is this entangled morass, but in the end I suppose all I, and we who present the Buddhist Festival, is give some of the same old ethical guidelines, and point to them when it comes to light that someone has been violated.

So far:

I wish to address the issue of legitimacy. How do you, a potential Buddhist practitioner, decide on the credentials of the person you look on as a teacher? There are teachers who do not come from a line of Dharma Transmission. There are teachers who have ethical and/or psychological training. There are teachers who have been judged to have a spiritual understanding that enables them to guide you on this path of enlightenment. How do you judge these things?
Regardless of credentials, teachers will be human, and will transgress boundaries. Guidelines regarding these boundaries need to be listed.

Zen Beginnings

2010-12-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

Someone asked on my alumni email list why we changed religions, specifically naming me among others. Why, and at what point in our life, we came to Buddhism, etc.

First, I said, Such a big question! So much to say...I guess I'll do the zen thing and boil it down to the essence....

St. John's is directly responsible.

Then, I sent another post:

that is to say...
When I came to St. John's it slowly dawned on me that I had difficulty interacting with the books and in seminar because I did not know myself. A momentous realization occurred during, or I should say after, the Symposium seminar, when quite a few of us piled into cars and the back of a pickup and went to Spike Venable's house to continue the party. (All Spike had left in the house was some sherry, which we eagerly drank because it was booze of some kind.)

Certain moments at that party blend together as the moment when I realized. Mr. Cornell saying "Ms. Hoog... is drunk! Ms. Hoog... is drunk!" and me thinking 'yeah so are you!' and me responding to something somebody asked by saying, "I don't know what I believe!" realizing that at that moment I could no longer call myself a Christian and two friends of Spike's, not Johnnies, who insisted it was possible to be Buddhist *and* Christian. I had no idea what Buddhism was, and if they explained, I was too drunk to retain it.

But I was beginning to uncover myself. I was busy imbibing Great Books, often reading them twice but still not knowing what to say.

Along about the time we were reading the Bible, my boss in the library, Jon Schaefer, [son of Jack Schaefer] would talk with much enthusiasm about his Buddhist beliefs and about his experiences meditating with Some Great American Convert I don't remember who, who so steadfastly meditated in the snow, etc. I was intrigued, but didn't know what about, really. Some unremembered amount of time later, I was in the bookstore buying up some needed Great Books, when I paused at the Eastern Philosophies/Religions bookshelf, vaguely remembering Jon's enthusiasms.

George Wen... noticed my pause and asked if I was wondering what to start with. I supposed I was. So on his recommendation I bought Zen Mind Beginner's Mind and Three Pillars of Zen. The first I began to read and was hooked. Yes! Yes! Yes! It felt like coming home. The second I used for the illustrations and instructions on how to meditate, but didn't much read because I didn't want to read about answers before I had a chance to experience, having got the message from ZMBM that this was very much an experiential religion.

I tried meditating, but it felt weird, so I gave it up. Long about the time I was able to choose my first preceptorial, and got into "Ancient Chinese Philosophy" with Ralph Swentzell, I thought it might be a good time to try meditating again, and Jon was starting up a pre-seminar meditation period. Never mind that this was pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy, I knew nothing about that.

So I started meditating, and this time it felt right. That first time, I felt like I was swirling down into a vortex. This time I felt like a Weight Lifted, and I felt ebullient. I have long felt fortunate for that early experience, as it kept me on the path. Buddhist faith asks that you give it a try, and you will eventually experience why it was worth giving a try. This early experience became a beacon when I might have drifted for the sameness of the meditation experience.

It seems to have been a blessing of my life... Blessing? Serendipity? Coincidence? That I chose to walk a path for perhaps the silliest of reasons, and the path I chose turned out to be so important. It's significant to me now that I didn't start meditating until I was ready. The St. John's way was working to help me make the unconscious conscious to the point where I could be ready for the more powerful uncovering of meditation. Being away from my dysfunctional home was helping me shed fear that was instrumental in creating the wall that kept me from knowing myself.

Later on I came to see the religion of my childhood was a pasted-on belief. Since I was a child when it was offered, and at times forced on me, it wasn't something I really had a choice about. I didn't really have much choice about knowing myself, either, as for my survival in a dysfunctional house it was best not to fully face the unfairness of it. Come to think of it, having come to a safe place during a time of exploration, it was probably inevitable that I would lose my religion, among other things.

That's the beginning.

Mad Lib Myth Creations

2010-11-29T23:27:00.000-08:00

My first thought on hearing about the attempted bombing of Portland's living room was 'I wonder how much of this was the boy's idea, and how much the FBI's idea? My next, he must be mentally ill. I first learned of this via the Mayor's blog post via his Facebook feed. At least his headline made clear from the beginning that people were never actually under any real threat: The bomb was a fake but the suspect thought it was real.

My first concerns were that the facts of this situation might never be truly available to us, it would certainly be distorted in the media to fortify calls for greater security, it would fortify the continued erosion of civil rights, and it would be difficult for this young man to get a fair trial. More concerns tumbled through my head, like, isn't it convenient that this great threat comes on the heels of several weeks of protest over the implementation of full body scans or full body pat-downs at airports? No doubt it will be used to shut people up. And oh yeah, wikileaks has published more embarrassing duplicitous stuff by government officials. Could this be a wag the dog event? While the world looks at the US Embassy cables and gets mad, will Americans be caught up in this home terrorist threat?

As the fallout news shakes out, I begin to realize this could have been a very calculated wag the dog event. Five years ago, thanks to the persistent voices of activists on the street and in city hall, and a rational liberal mayor, Portland said no to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. No, the city would no longer share its police officers with the FBI in a task force that pushed the limits of civil rights. Now, the voices are rising for it. Could it be the FBI never forgave Portland for pulling out? These two news stories are becoming one and the same.

My wish to know more about just what part the FBI played, and what part the young man played, was quickly fulfilled. At least a couple of friends in my social networks shared the link to the original affidavit. From this I learned that this seems to be a teenage misanthropic fantasy only allowed to come to apparent fruition through the encouragement of the FBI agents. Young Mohamed Osman Mohamud allegedly had email contact with someone based in Pakistan that allegedly used coded words regarding his willingness "to prepare for violent jihad." His attempt to contact a second "Unindicted Associate" failed. After that, the FBI contacted him, pretending to be a third associate to numbers 1 and 2.

The undercover FBI agents gave Mohamed several options. Multiple choice. I thought, would this boy even have gone this far without those choices made concrete? Before this, he had vague notions of going to the Middle East, and going to Alaska to earn big money so he could go to the Middle East, but he was unable to do either. Without the suggestions by the FBI, might someone have noticed he was emotionally disturbed, and got help for him? What he needed then was compassion. He certainly needed to be watched carefully, but he didn't need someone to give him a road map to dark fantasy fulfillment.

It seemed to me the agents rounded him into a corner (you can't join up overseas, you're on the no-fly list) and gave him a clear route out to his dark desires. The affidavit makes this sound so reasonable, like they never led the young man to these choices, that he just stepped in this pile of shit of his own free will. But I wonder, what kind of body indicators were they giving them as they asked? What subtle hints in intonation? Choice number 1 was praying 5 times a day, and number 4 to become "operational." A young man has finally met his heroes (he thinks) and he wants to impress them, right?

So then, the FBI agents lead him down a path. They have a blueprint for action, and they tell him what they need to fill in the blanks. It's like Mad Libs for terrorists. OK, we need an action. He comes back with a dramatic one, bomb the tree-lighting crowd in Portland. Oh, that's good! Now, how do you want to do this? More dark drama, the more dramatic the better...kill the women and children. Video games, movies, rap, they all call for the dramatic. He wants a bomb, a big bomb? Well, then he needs to buy this stuff. They give him the money for the stuff. (Only a portion of the supplies actually needed for a bomb.) They give him the money for a hotel to hide out. The FBI builds the "bomb." The FBI provides the van, and the strategic plan. More blanks for him to fill in: a map with several possibilities for the "bomb"-loaded van to park. The FBI makes sure the parking spot is available. He has to drive the van, but he doesn't have to get himself to a remote location. The FBI can do that. Final blank to fill in: he must make the phone call to trigger the "bomb".

So the news is that a bomb threat was foiled. The FBI narrowly prevented a tragedy. "The bottom line of all this is that the FBI saved Portland from a potentially horrendous attack." No...the bottom line of all this is that we are seeing myths created before our eyes. There was never a real threat to the festive tree-lighting event in Portland. There was no real bomb threat to be foiled or narrowly prevented. A young man who had adolescent fantasies of destruction was fed fantasy fulfillment, and given experts, money, and a clutter-free path to give it a form bigger than he'd probably ever imagined on his own.

I admit I thought to myself Why am I immediately suspicious? This is what people refer to when they say someone like me hates America. What can I say to them? I say it is not new to the peace movement that agents will insinuate themselves into a group, look for weaknesses, and wedge the cracks open. They will incite members to plan violence where no motive toward violence existed before. Because I want my country to live up to its professed ideals, I don't want government-sponsored agent provocateurs doing this kind of thing. I say I would simply like to know the facts, if it is possible. The peace movement's greatest weapons are transparency, honesty, and commitment to non-violence. The weapons of secret agents are isolation of individuals, deceit, and incitements to violence. I would just like this case to be transparent. Let's hear those conversations between secret agents and the violent-jihad-bound young man, not just the picked bits chosen to fortify the affidavit and the fears of the masses.

Further reading supports my fears. Salon shares that the crucial conversation, in which Mohamed chooses from five options, is missing, that there were technical difficulties. Really? Scarily convenient. We'll never know how unequivocal he was about it now, will we? I learn also this Mad Lib for Wanna-Be Terrorists has happened before. It looks like you could have quite a bit of reading, if you care, at this link to a Truthout story on that. Indeed, my Portland pacifist friend reminds us that it's not even the first time in Portland that the FBI has cooked up some completely false allegations.

I am not trying to say this is entrapment according to the law; I have no idea. I was surprised to find from the Salon article that the multiple choice options are to address that very concern, when to me it seems the very options put the ideas into an impressionable young man's head. But what about the people who will say I am making excuses for terrorists? I feel sorry for Mohamed Osman Mohamud. It may be he is a dangerous person. If the cherry-picked statements regarding his wish to kill families and children are to be believed, he is a scary person. I only hope he gets a fair trial, and I regret that it already appears his case exists to fulfill fears of terrorists and to encourage the loss of civil rights.

Spud

2010-11-19T00:14:00.000-08:00

I posted a review at Yelp for Spud.com. It has become my preferred grocery delivery method. I don't usually do Yelp reviews, but Spud spurred me along at Facebook with a chance to win dinner for two.

Seriously, I'm not sucking up, I really do like Spud a lot.

Let me count the ways I love Spud as a delivery service:

1. Delivery is free if I buy as little as $34.00 worth of stuff. Other grocery delivery services only sometimes give you a coupon for free delivery, and that's only if you buy certain stuff and spend at least $150.00. Even if I had no other reason to like Spud, this makes them a winner.
2. I don't have to be home when they deliver.
3. Even if I am not home, they keep the cold stuff cold with ice packs and dry ice.
4. They use reusable crates rather than disposable paper or plastic bags. (and no deposits required for crates or ice packs)
5. When I buy milk with returnable bottles, Spud takes the bottles back and reimburses me the deposit.
6. I never trust other grocery delivery services to give me good produce that I would pick myself, but I've always been happy with the produce from Spud.
7. I have a choice, to ask for a delivery when I want one, or to ask for a regularly scheduled delivery, and I have a choice as to how often that happens.
8. I don't need some rewards card, but I do earn points for money spent, and actually get money back towards my next delivery fairly often.
9. Spud makes it very easy to know if what I'm buying is from a local company, and even rewards me with the possibility of free stuff if I buy enough local stuff.
10. I get to pick and choose what I want delivered, but if I forget to do that in time, Spud picks some produce for me based on my preferences.

I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting. As with any delivery service, I love not having to cart those heavy groceries home on the bus. The only drawback: they don't have as many choices available as those other services that charge around $10 for delivery. They do have the kinds of things I want: organic, local produce; and environmentally friendly household goods. The funny thing is, since I started using Spud, those other services are offering me free delivery if I will come back to them. Now, if only they started carrying Swheat brand cat litter...

Kuchen

2010-11-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

I dug out my family recipe for kuchen. There's no great family secret about this recipe...you could do a Google search for a kuchen recipe and find dozens that are similar. As I look at it, I am reminded of the form of the recipes my family shared. These days recipes take the form of listing the ingredients and numbering the steps to bake. The way we shared, I realize now, was designed to fit all on a 3X5 card. It was assumed the recipient cooked and baked, and didn't need step by step instructions with full sentences. It doesn't say so, but I'm sure this recipe came from Great Grandma Spradau. I copied it from her daughter's recipe card, Grandma Knowles. That's Grandma Spradau in front, with her birthday corsage, one of her daughters in the back (Aunt Vera?).

I got this out because I'm going to bake a kuchen for my co-workers. Somebody started a cake-of-the-month club, and way back when I signed up for November. I don't do so much baking now. It's years since I baked this...but you don't forget, do you?

A month or so ago somebody also proposed we create a zine with all our recipes, and each of us who brought a cake could design a page of the zine, or at least hand our recipes over to the zine editors. I started to think in terms of story as well as cake. I'd really hoped the recipe would be in my grandma's handwriting, then I would scan and put the recipe in the zine as-is. Sadly, it is in my crappy mistake-ridden handwriting. Perhaps I will still include it that way.

I thought briefly about making the Poppy Seed Cake, written out by my grandma, all for the story. There's Grandma Knowles' handwriting, and Grandma Spradau's name, and there's the form our recipes took: brackets pointing from the ingredients to the actions, ever more cramped at the bottom of the card.

I don't think I've ever made this cake though. I loved it when my grandma made it. It doesn't even say, but I"m pretty sure when done she would wrap it in tin foil, and the cooked vanilla pudding would soak into the cake, unless that was a different recipe. However, another reason I love it is that there is NO LEMON. Why does everything sweet poppy seed also have to have lemon these days?

But there is story to the Fruit Kuchen recipe as well. I had to do a Google search myself, seeing that no fruit amount was listed. Some recipes listed about 4 cups. Then I remembered that you put enough fruit to cover the batter, and of course, in this old school way of sharing, the women would just know how much they would need.

Grandma, my mom, and my aunt most often made this in the spring and early summer. First when the rhubarb was ready, later, when the raspberries were ripe.

There's my mom, my grandpa, my grandma, and my aunt at my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary celebration. I wasn't able to attend because I was away at college.

I know my great grandpa came from Germany. I'm not sure about his wife...I'll have to ask my mom. Either she did too, or her parents did. As a family, we certainly had a lot of German eating habits, like kuchen, and vinegar on vegetables. (And we would say we would "go by so-and-so's house" rather than "visit" or "go to" ...it's a German thing.)

I suppose I could find some rhubarb in the frozen food section, but I decided I would find something fresh and local, so I put pears and apples on my grocery delivery list. I'm not sure which one yet...maybe both. I still want to plant rhubarb in my front yard as a part of the edible landscaping. I want to make rhubarb custard pie, rhubarb kuchen, and take a raw stalk and suck on it, making my mouth pucker so I can remember that childhood feeling of wondering why I was doing that if it was so tart. And, with rhubarb in my yard, I can feel connected just a little bit to my family's traditions. Everybody had a rhubarb patch.

books books books

2010-11-10T23:59:00.000-08:00

Unless I suddenly stop reading, this year I will surpass the number of books read in previous years since I started keeping track at Goodreads. I have been so much more interested in reading than in writing. I blame the Kindle, among other things. I don't recall feeling the reading bug bite me so bad since I was an awkward kid in junior high. In August, I read the entire Sookie Stackhouse series in 2 weeks. Some of us who've been attending the Read the Classics series didn't want to take a summer break, so we read and discussed Absalom, Absalom!, Heart of Darkness, and The Sun Also Rises. Especially notable from my Hollywood Library book group were The Echo Maker and The Sparrow, though we've been reading some great books all along. Here's this year's schedule.

More recently, I got to meet the author of Lean on Pete. He's also the singer/songwriter for Richmond Fontaine. He was sweetly authentic. The several nurses who attend our group were stumbling over each other encouraging him to keep going with his current project about nurses. I told him as soon as his other books were available for the Kindle, I would buy them. He'd certainly like them to be, but apparently his publisher has other ideas. They are available in the UK, but not the US....grrrr. This turns out to be the only book for my book club that I couldn't read on the Kindle. Seriously, the device has helped me be a better book group leader.

I also got to see Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin as part of Portland Arts and Lectures the same month we read Oryx and Crake. As soon as I finished that, I immediately read the parallel sequel, Year of the Flood, which, it turns out, I really should listen to as well, as songs are key pieces of the book. Finish a book at 1 am, it's all too easy with the Kindle to buy the next one in 30 seconds.

I will say though, that because I have fully embraced my preference for reading books on the Kindle, I have returned many library books. Often I would say all those books with all those due dates were like a ball and chain. What a burden bounty can be, eh?

So I was thinking, I must have spent a lot more money on books, right, now that, if I have the choice, I read it on the Kindle? I received my first Kindle for my birthday in May 2009. (Oh yes...I did buy the "latest generation" of the Kindle, and I am happy I did. My first one went to a good home.) I looked at the money I spent on books from May 2008 to May 2009, and then from May 2009 to May 2010. I actually only went from $270 to $336. The immediate past 12 months, however, add up to $570. All those Stackhouse books.... So yeah, you could say the Kindle has rekindled my love of book-reading.

Everyday Zen, I read twice over, as I co-led a class on it at my Zen Center. The first class did not record, but you can listen to the other classes. Download Class 2, on Chapter 2, here. Class 3, on Chapter 3. Class 4, on Chapters 4 and 5. The final two classes haven't been uploaded yet. We had a handout for the class...you can find it here on Facebook. (and no, you don't have to belong to Facebook to see it.) As far as preparing for the class, I bow again to the Kindle. It was so easy to highlight, jot notes, review and print notes and highlights to discuss with my co-teacher and our mentor, and consequently prepare for the class.

Catching up, again

2010-08-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

I always said to myself I would not be one of those bloggers that wasted time and blogspace with apologies over not posting, but after such a long absence I guess it would be weird not to acknowledge it. Where did the time go? Little things kept me from sitting at the desktop...back trouble, then a foot injury, then just the absence of habit and the new habit of Facebook. I need to steer my habits back to this spot. I need to push the reset button in part anyway. I'd like to get back to the original intent, to explore the multiplicities in my life. For a while toward the end I was heavy into the book blogging. While I enjoy doing the slow reads and the reviews, they take up a lot of time, and I don't want those to be all this blog is about.

Interestingly, in the seven years since I began writing here, my Whitman quote seems to have spread as a meme. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. More people I encounter online use it as their tagline. The idea of multiplicity has spread, and is a natural descriptive word for the online world. There is nothing but multiplicity here.

During this lucky seven years, books have regained a larger piece of my identity. When I was a kid, that was the majority of my entertainment. Now, book groups have changed my reading from mere imbibing to reflection, review, and inquiry. Those qualities certainly have been part of my reading experience considering my college experience, but recent years have brought a resurgence of the joy along with a consciousness of what I have to offer others from my experience of books. While I have been a decent facilitator of my library's book group, this past year I have noticed more responses from participants that show my skills have bumped up a notch or three. I'm sure revisiting my college experience and participating in the Read the Classics series has helped my ability to get to the heart of a book, and steer the conversation in that direction. Half a dozen of us Classics readers were just not ready to take a break for the summer, so we read three books: Absalom, Absalom, Heart of Darkness, and The Sun Also Rises. We rocked, figuring out these books.

This summer I had a booth for the Portland Chapter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship at the Division/Clinton Street Fair for the first time. I don't know why I haven't done this before...money I guess. I really appreciated that their theme was about community, while the Hawthorne and the Belmont Street Fairs seem to be about Spend Money at Our Businesses. I liked it so much I thought I'd do those as well, but it didn't work out with my schedule.

I created on-the-spot enso pictures for people. Kids were the best. They gave me new ideas for animals in which to incorporate an enso. The kids totally got it when I explained an enso represented that clear, open mind we get from sitting in quiet meditation. I came up with the idea of a comic strip called ensoland. Every creature would have an enso as part of their being, and they would go about solving conundrums of the spirit.

My homi read her poetry at the library this summer. Two loves in one spot.

One of my pumpkin plants has taken over the front yard landscaping. I believe it is the jack-o-lantern plant. It overwhelmed the Howden pumpkin plant. The Howden originally had the first small pumpkins, but they fell off. My yard guy said that was because they weren't pollinated. The big plant kept wrapping its tendrils around my blueberry bushes, tomato plants, and herb plants. Naughty pumpkin...I scolded it as I rescued my other plants. Next year I plan to supplant it with a rhubarb plant. Maybe somebody I know will be ready to divide their root mass this fall. All my tomatoes are still green.

See more photos here, including this wacky guerrilla sign. Can you tell me what it says?

Garden just about done

2010-06-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

Many things have been keeping me busy and away from the computer. While I didn't do most of the labor, some of this garden project kept me busy. I hired friend Koken for some of it, and friend Stan for most of it. While I chose to dot the wall with different colored bricks, like a brick wall, Stan deserves the credit for the layout and curved design. He also shaped the remaining slope of the yard. I wanted to have pretty much all edible landscaping. I got advice from my wise groundskeeper friend, and I went to a program on edible landscaping at the library. It turned out to be presented by a facebook Buddhist friend of mine.

I planted the veggies in the front, and some of the mint areas, that's all. I plan to have a garden party, maybe in July or August. Maybe some of the tomatoes will be ready. We've had so much rain, some people lost their tomatoes to lack of sun and heat and too much rain, and I actually come out ahead, having planted late.

Here's what the juniper bushes looked like (all I had was a winter scene, because otherwise, why did I want to take a photo of these runaway bushes?):

And here's when they were taken out:

Objects the guys found in the dirt under the bushes:

My neighbor two doors down said she probably was the one who lost the baseball. Now she has a couple of kids who will be the ones losing baseballs. When I planted the veggies, I found another toy, a 4-in. orange frisbee from Trix.

Plants ready:

Blueberries already!

See the full front yard with plants labeled here. Note I plan to put roses in this winter, where the veggies are. Even roses are edible. Vitamin C! As far as I know, the Red-veined Sorrel is not edible. Somehow that ended up in my box at Farmington Gardens, though I don't remember picking it out. Speaking of Farmington Gardens, that was a fun outing with my sweet friend from work.

See all the photos in this slideshow.

Slow Read: Mrs. Dalloway: finished

2010-02-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Just as I was afraid of, Septimus kills himself. He acts as though cornered by Dr. Holmes...better to jump than to face the man. The omniscient narrator flits with the ambulance back to Peter.

Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust too over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more--fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner though the light high bell could be heard down the next street and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing--this susceptibility--in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the right time, or laughing either.

I just remembered, in The Voyage Out, Clarissa Dalloway said she loved her husband because he was a man, as well as like a woman to her, referring to their ability to be intimate with each other. Yet here, later in their life, the two don't seem quite so close. It is Peter who is reminiscing about their time together when young, and his own emotional upheavals, which one would think at that time would be ascribed to a woman.

Clarissa had a theory in those days--they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other?

...It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps--perhaps.

Here is another possible way to see the whole of the story, "that unseen part of us, which spreads wide." We get just one day, and as the story flows from one to another character, we get a deeper understanding of each. The whole of each person cannot be explained fully through their own thoughts, or through the views of others upon them, but altogether.

Peter on Daisy, his wife-to-be:

so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious!

After 30 years, Peter is settling, it seems. So he goes to the party, telling himself he'd like to pick Richard Dalloway's brain. He's somewhat ambivalent, however. Does he really judge Clarissa this way, or is he talking himself into it?

"How delightful to see you!" said Clarissa. She said it to every one. How delightful to see you! She was at her worst--effusive, insincere. It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh

Clarissa is surprised at her own party:

What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter? "Clarissa!" That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn't looked like that, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to think of her under this roof, under this roof! Not like that! All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled out--passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance of seeing you! So I thrust myself in--without an invitation. . .

Peter softens as he watches the party:

There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she said good-bye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)

Peter and Sally wait and watch while Clarissa flits about as hostess. Sir William arrives...I knew it! The connection.

The party's splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery. What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party--the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself--but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!

I wonder what the old lady symbolizes. Earlier, Mrs. Dalloway had watched her, musing on the intimacy of the old neighbor's actions, not knowing she was watched. Now, Clarissa retreats from her party for a few minutes.

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!--in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was--ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen.

Now Clarissa is witnessed. And she ponders...

The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.

Meanwhile, Peter and Sally connect.

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl's of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year.

And Richard is charmed by his daughter, and tells her so.

And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy.

It was the perfect thing for Elizabeth to hear just then.

And this is the end:

"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

At first I thought, well, he never was out of love with her. But now I'm thinking it is that invisible connection that has lit him up. It is because she enters fresh from her epiphanic moment. Of course it is a moment in which one could fall in love all over again, or one could connect with Love again.

I've been wondering, just what was her epiphanic moment? It seems to be that she completely connected to life is Just This. Moments connect, and this is what makes life beautiful. Even in death.

Schedule
The beginning
The 2nd quarter
The 3rd quarter

Slow Read: Mrs. Dalloway: 3/4 through

2010-02-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

When I reached my arbitrary stopping point (no chapters!) I was wondering if Sir William was as good a doctor as his fame warranted, and if he was the connection of Septimus to Clarissa.

Not so sure I like Sir William as a doctor, but I imagine he would have been popular for the way he took problems away. Out of sight, out of mind, and euthanization.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion--his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women

Poor Rezia. She is a good woman who still cares for her husband, and intuitively doesn't trust Sir William.

He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relations of his victims. But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did not like that man.

Richard Dalloway has lunch with Lady Bruton and Hugh Whitbread on the same day as Clarissa's party. My, there's a lot that fits into this day. Lady B doesn't like Clarissa. How astute of Richard to be the one to remind/ask Lady B to the party. Milly Brush, her assistant:

"D'you know who's in town?" said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking her. "Our old friend, Peter Walsh." They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad, Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken. Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing--how passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Brush saw that...

Richard must be quite the politician. He can't truly be glad to hear about his old rival being in town? They apparently agree that if Peter's looking for a position, they won't really be able to help him. ""In trouble with some woman," said Lady Bruton. They had all guessed that that was at the bottom of it."

After they leave, Lady B dozes and dreams, and this seems significant to me, like this is how all the people are connected, underneath the conscious world, and would explain the way the story is told, as though the omniscient narrator is passed from person to person, familiar character to stranger, and back.

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down.

Richard fills out as a character:

Why these people stood that damned insolence he could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass. Richard Dalloway could not stand more than an hour of his society.

...She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was holding out flowers--roses, red and white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.) But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa.

I am so impressed with Woolf's ability to show us know how, from the outside, Clarissa seems to be a social butterfly, but from the inside she is thoughtful, and finds deeper meaning in her daily life and her talents.

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough.

Miss Kilman: what a pill. "But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. "Turning her large gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton!""

Elizabeth learns from Miss Kilman. Is it good for her?

But then Miss Kilman was frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived with everything they wanted,--her mother had breakfast in bed every day; Lucy carried it up; and she liked old women because they were Duchesses, and being descended from some Lord. But Miss Kilman said (one of those Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over), "My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington." Miss Kilman made one feel so small.

It seems perhaps Elizabeth will learn the good from Miss Kilman, without buying into the bad. Perhaps the appeal is simply that Elizabeth identifies more with dad than mom, and his simpler needs. Elizabeth leaves Miss Kilman for a walkabout.

And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning. . . . People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.

A sweet time between Rezia and Septimus. I wonder if his apparent lucidity, and their sweet connection, foreshadows something bad.

It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters' hat. "Just look at it," he said. Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat. He told her to try it on. "But I must look so queer!" she cried, running over to the glass and looking first this side then that.

...But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw. She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough.

Uh-oh. This definitely can't be good.

She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she had written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings--were they?--on their backs; circles traced round shillings and sixpences--the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans--his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.

I would like to get a glimpse of those papers. Crazy brilliant, I bet. His wish to burn them does not bode well.

Schedule
The beginning
The 2nd quarter

Slow Read: Mrs. Dalloway: halfway through

2010-01-27T23:58:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

I left the last reading wondering how Clarissa Dalloway might have been affected by Peter's visit. This reading gives a glimpse into Peter's response. He surprised himself with tears. He thought he'd been over this years ago. It seems to me both are experiencing the rebirth of old selves. I wonder what they will find their relationship to those old selves will be?

Stalk women much, Peter? It seems Peter has a fantasy life without being very reflective about it:

There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard's flickering tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little diversion), a cool waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy. She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her was the last thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would say "Come and have an ice," he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply, "Oh yes."

So Peter falls asleep in the park,

Suddenly he closed his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and threw away the heavy end of his cigar. A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children's voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over.

and also in the park is Mr. Septimus Smith. Why is he and his wife in this story, I wonder? They were in the vicinity of Mrs. Dalloway, and in the vicinity of Peter, but is there going to be something more significant? It seems to be a pretty convincing glimpse inside Septimus's head, and how far gone he is, seems like schizophrenia to me, but it seems also to be brought about by the war. Hallucinations:

It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away. Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men?

Peter reminisces:

Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter quite lately about "blue hydrangeas." It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made her think of him and the old days--Sally Seton, of course! It was Sally Seton--the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!

Sally Seton...wasn't she Clarissa's love interest back when? She was!

Over and over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people conglomerated round her of course. But odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. ...As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners

Clarissa seems to be something of a salon hostess, or a patroness. Huxley and Tyndall must be significant. Oh, they were scientists seeking to separate science from religion. Atheists again. Clarissa doesn't believe in God.

Considering his stalkerishness, I was wondering if Peter was really getting married. The lady does exist...he just doesn't appear to like her attentions all that much. Hmmm.

It was impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one might say these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he never thought of Daisy. Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering the misery, the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a different thing altogether--a much pleasanter thing--the truth being, of course, that now she was in love with him. And that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her little attentions--cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage--in his cabin.

Back to Septimus. This is also why I think of schizophrenia:

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy's business of the intoxication of language--Antony and Cleopatra--had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.

Dr. Holmes, inept general practitioner. Sir William at least can diagnose mental illness when he sees it. Could Sir William be the connection between Dalloway and Smith?

Schedule
The beginning

Facebook Wayback

2010-01-27T00:20:00.000-08:00

Last week the meme spread to change our Facebook profile photo to one from wayback. I chose one I used here from my 2 year birthday. However, when it comes to status and links, it seems "wayback" is more like a month or two ago. Here are some things I want to remember from wayback...this summer.

I often went to this farm stand, which was in the parking lot of the restaurant right behind the library, right after I got off work on Thursdays.

We trust no kittehs were harmed in the making of this video.

Via Choten: One year walk/beard video

Found when looking for ways people told the story of Buddha's Enlightenment: a Mary Oliver poem.

My allergies have been worse for longer periods of time, and I've heard from others. Just as I suspected, climate change is doing this.

Further proof that "evolutionary psychology" is a poorly disguised pseudo-scientific vehicle for the dissemination of bigotry

Inspired by Felicia's hurricane, I wondered if there was a Hurricane Heidi. Indeedy, 1967, I was 5 months old. There was also a Tropical Storm Heidi in September 1971. I just remembered, my family moved to the house I grew up in when I was 5 months old.

This work and video done by co-worker's daughter.

Fun stop-motion video made from innards of old cameras.

Sherman Alexie short story: War Dances.

Not Always Right: the rain in Portland.

The health care reform debate was raging this summer. Now it is sadly another corporate entitlement. Then, I said:

The money that could be spent on health care to cover everybody is hardly anything compared to the money that has been spent on war for the past 8 years. If we can spend that kind of money on destruction, we can spend that kind of money on health, and what we get back will not be rubble and blood, but able human beings who can participate positively in our communities and our economy.

I still haven't seen the movie. Sure, I will eventually. But meanwhile I hope to get around to reading the blog that inspired Julie/Julia.

Snow leopard!

Slow Read: Mrs. Dalloway: The Beginning

2010-01-17T23:49:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

First, let me say I really enjoyed The Voyage Out. There was an intimate feel to the gatherings of the English expatriates somewhere in South America. Before arriving, however, Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway were passengers on the ship which housed the heroine Rachel Vinrace. I was so intrigued by that little glimpse, I quite looked forward to Mrs. Dalloway. Rachel is an innocent. She hasn't been awakened to the ecstasies and epiphanies of love. The other characters on the ship provide examples of couples, such as her relatives, the Ambroses, as well as the Dalloways. The Dalloways are a key to her awakening. He is a politician, she his adoring wife. Their marriage appears to be the perfect example: they enjoy intimacies in private; they know each others' quirks; they enjoy each other. Yet when there's an unexpected intimate moment with Rachel, Mr. Dalloway kisses her. He seems to feel Rachel brought it on them both; she, however, is ignited. This is the spark that ignites her pilot light to love. (She has a very yonic/phallic dream.) She does not completely understand this feeling, but likes it, and is ripe, ready to fall in love. Reading, I hoped the right person would happen along. The Dalloways depart, and I find myself wondering, does this happen before or after the next book I read? Are the Dalloways really so understanding of each other, even of themselves, as they at first appear to be? That kiss seems to belie the notion, but it also was a kiss that needed to happen, so as to awaken Rachel, the sleeping beauty.

The story of Mrs. Dalloway begins with her running errands for her dinner party. While she walks, she muses. She'd chosen Richard Dalloway over Peter.

But Peter--however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink--Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him.... So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right--and she had too--not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

I've been wondering how old is she as compared to The Voyage Out? This doesn't help me much:

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

In The Voyage Out many if not most characters were not religious. Mrs. Dalloway informed Rachel she didn't know yet. Clearly Mrs. D. was part of a set who thought about such things, and Rachel hadn't needed to, yet. I wonder if this was the norm at the time, or was the author's ideal world. This thoughtful non-belief seemed also to carry an enlightened rationality.

not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it...

What a heady time it must have been for the Woolfs, to be part of the Bloomsbury Group, in which they rebelled against the Victorian age. And hmmm, what great fodder for books.

She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident--like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. ...But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?

Speak of the devil. Hadn't she just been thinking about this guy? Peter's quite sure Clarissa will see him.

"But he never liked any one who--our friends," said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day.

He announces his new love. Does this upset her world view? We'll see, I suppose. Certainly she began his visit by telling him she was having a party and he wasn't invited (or was she being coquettish?), but when he leaves abruptly

saying "Good-bye, Clarissa" without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and opening the hall door. "Peter! Peter!" cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing. "My party to-night! Remember my party to-night!" she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air

What a day for ghosts in Mrs. Dalloway's life. She ponders her past as she prepares for the night's dinner, and one shows up, opening old doors she'd thought she'd closed.

I liked the way the point of view shifted from one character to the next as Mrs. Dalloway went about her walk and her errands, like it was the wind listening in on the thoughts of the people on the street.

Schedule

Fat Karma: Voodoo Hex of Fat Fear

2010-01-06T23:45:00.000-08:00

I've been busy reading those books quite relevant to this subject, and designed a Buddhist class series focusing mostly on Mindful Eating, but also including information from Health at Every Size, and Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat.

I've got a list around here somewhere of threads I'd still like to cover. Add this website, First Do No Harm, to things to check out regarding Health Care Bigotry. While procrastinating over my class series preparation I read through all of these. It is heartbreaking. The most recent is on anesthetic. I just love :/ how health care providers will act as if it is the fat person's fault that they cannot figure out the correct dosage. How hard can it be to improve dosage knowledge?

On to this thread. There are quite a few soggy science articles on obesity. I just read one today that was an eye-roller. Whenever you come across an article on how bad obesity is, take some time trying to find the science in it. Well, first you'll notice the required fat-person pornography. You know, the lazy fat person body parts that show just how gluttonous and unsexy we fat Americans are. This lazy article claims obesity has surpassed smoking as the "bigger drag on health." The science they quote? Debunked, long ago. There was no such thing as a quarter of a million deaths from obesity. CDC even admitted that was a mistake. A mistake!

A CDC-sponsored study, published last April in PLoS Medicine, found that as of 2005 smoking was the most frequent killer (causing about one in five deaths), with high blood pressure following up close behind (causing one in six deaths). Obesity came in third at that point, being responsible for almost a quarter of a million deaths—or one in 10.

What else do they have to say? That some survey said obesity affects quality of life? Well, maybe if we weren't of a group still acceptable to marginalize, maybe we'd have a better quality of life. If I have one quibble with the documentary series, Unnatural Causes, it's that they didn't cover the detrimental effect that sizism has on people. Perhaps that is because a cascade effect demonizing "excess" weight has been in effect for so many years that there are no studies looking for anything but fat as the cause for poor health. It is entrenched in the public consciousness that fat is bad. Yet Unnatural Causes showed that inequalities because of wealth, societal standing, and race all have an effect on health, even down to a person's propensity to catch a cold. See number six: chronic stress can be toxic.

That is part of the voodoo hex equation. Everyone tells us we have poor health because of our weight. Many feel justified in treating us differently because of our weight. Doctors treat us differently because many of them view us as ugly, lazy, lying, and/or non-compliant. This chronic stress has an effect on all those indicators that are linked with obesity, and for which obesity is blamed.

Because we have these messages coming at us, many of us from the time we were children, many of us believe them. We believe we are unhealthy. We believe as long as we are fat, we are incapable of being healthy. Not only does this add to the chronic stress, and diminish our motivation, it has to spark a nocebo response. Heck, the placebo/nocebo response works on some even if they don't believe it.

I think of this karma like many little pins poking us. Every time a person has a thought about the badness of their fat, it is a pin poking them. Every time a doctor tells a person it's going to make them unhealthy, it's a pin poking them. If we believe it, and continually think these negative thoughts toward our bodies and our supposed inability to take care of them, we continually poke these needles in our psyche. I visualize myself repelling those pins. I refuse to let them sink in, to draw blood. You should do it too. Whether you think you could lose a few pounds, or the doctors keep telling you that you must lose weight, don't let those nasty pins prick you. Don't feed those thoughts that say, if only I lost some weight, this walk would be easier. If you think that, the walk will be hard, and it's though it doesn't count. Allow it to count. Allow yourself to feel how healthy your body really is.

I have had doctors scold me, telling me I need to exercise more. (Remember, they don't ask. I don't remember anyone ever asking.) When I say I do, and that I also have a fairly active job, they say it's not enough, and the job doesn't count. Funny thing, this study shows that if I believe that, indeed it will not be enough. I don't believe that thought. I believe there are aspects of my job that give me a workout, and it is indeed exercise that counts, like the housekeepers in the study. Jeez, I have proof. When I cut back from full to half time, I gained weight. Are these docs going to tell me I need to work out 20 hours a week to make up for the dropped work hours? Remember, those times Oprah lost her weight, she was working out many hours a day.

I fantasize about what a different world it would be if those who make it their job to care about my health would not try to hex my health. How much more pleasant it would be if a doctor expressed concern about my health by saying something like this: "I'm concerned about your weight, and your blood pressure going up in recent years. I've noticed otherwise your health indicators are quite good. Won't you tell me what your habits are that support your good health?" We could then proceed to have a conversation about those things I do that are good, and that I enjoy doing, and collaborate on how I could improve my habits. We could also acknowledge that my family's history of high blood pressure could be the thing that caused my slightly elevated number, and that perhaps perimenopause is effecting changes on my body. At no point in this fantasy does the doctor wish early death upon me, because at this point, none of my health indicators are that alarming.

Earlier posts in this series:
Introduction
It Starts Young
Health Care Bigotry
Morbidity and Weight

Slow Read: Mrs. Dalloway

2010-01-06T23:37:00.000-08:00

I'm going to begin another slow read starting this Sunday. I hope some will be inspired to join me. I find these slow reads nice for several reasons:

The amounts per week, even per day, are so small that I hardly need to take time out for this extra reading.
The time spent reflecting about the week helps the book sink in better, and I remember more of it much later.
I'm reading the books for a reason... in this case a Classics book group led by a professor...and this keeps me on track so I'm not cramming in the last few days.
If I know others are reading along, I am more inspired to write my reflections. I hope if you're reading along, you will make comments freely, or even post your own blog entries.

I must give a nod to the blogger at Bookshelves of Doom. She has been doing "Big Reads" for a couple of years. She's just started one on The Woman in White. I'd love to join her, but I've got more to read.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

You can find it here at Project Gutenberg Australia. Hmmm I wonder why it's not at the main Gutenberg site. Since I'm reading on the Kindle, and you may be reading some edition or another, I'm marking each reading by the beginning sentence. Or, just divide the book in 4 parts and consider that the approximate reading for the week.

Schedule

January 10-16: The beginning to...
January 17-23: Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street... to...
January 24- 30: How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him? to..
Jan. 31-Feb. 6: But Rezia laid her hands on them. to The End

I've begun reading this one:

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

It has Mrs. Dalloway as a character, and is Woolf's first book. I'm not reading slow, but I may not get finished before I need to start this other. I'm liking it so far.

I also need to read Dreams from my Father before the 19th for my library's book group. There I go, stacking up the books again.

View all my reviews >>

Books: Fat Karma

2009-12-30T23:55:00.000-08:00

I have to put together a class proposal for my seminary program at the Zen Center. This proposal won't necessarily be implemented, but its purpose is for us to show our understanding of issues we learned out in the leadership and ethics class series. Since I've been thinking about this fat karma stuff, I decided to check out this first book especially because Chozen Bays is a local teacher and because I'm thinking about food and fat in my Fat Karma series. Then the second book passed over my work desk, and I got excited by that. About the time I started looking at the first, I realized this could make a really neat class series, so I hurried up, skimmed the second, and finally read the third book, which excites me most of all.

I suspect others will find this an exciting class proposal as well, and it could very well turn into a class actually offered at the Zen Center. This challenges me, and scares me at the same time. This hot button topic will be sure to bring out advice, fear, and judgment from many participants...actually great for the presentation for seminary, as I'm supposed to address problematic situations we foresee could happen in our proposed class. Not so great for my comfort-level. Not only would I be challenging the cultural paradigm in a Zen setting, I would be questioning the wisdom of a beloved Zen teacher on a particular aspect of this topic, as you'll see below. The first is difficult enough, the second makes me fear being a Bad Zen Student. I worry that I would not have the grace to balance these delicate issues.

As far as designing that class, with some more studying of these books, I think the outline will fall into place. Plus, I need a name. I'm vacillating between "Food Karma and Mindful Eating" or "Body Karma and Mindful Eating" or "Food and Body Karma and Mindful Eating." I would appreciate any thoughts my readers have on that. The primary text would be "Mindful Eating" but I would bring much material from the other two books into play, as well as other fat activist resources, and my thoughts from the ongoing Fat Karma series.

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle by Michelle May

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I didn't fully read, but skimmed this book. I saw enough to know I like what the author has to say. I found it problematic that the author did not appear to mention "Health at Every Size." Perhaps this is because she seems somewhat still concerned about weight, and using her method as a way to encourage weight loss.

She presents her method as self-discovered, yet all her messages were just like those as presented in "Health at Every Size." (I read that one just after skimming this.)

I liked the way she identified 3 ways people eat: instinctive eaters; overeaters; and restrictive eaters. The book is about finding that instinctive way of eating again, and putting away the worse than useless dieting cycle of eat-repent-repeat. She talks about taking charge, rather than control, and that no food is forbidden. This is all good, but it is just the same as found in "Health at Every Size," and without what I felt was a key ingredient. The author of HAES makes every effort to warn against turning food mindfulness into another way to restrict, and to diet. I didn't see that so much here.

Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food by Jan Chozen Bays

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I feel like I should like this book more because the author is a local and loved Zen teacher. I think the method of mindful eating is well-presented and a useful tool, but enlightened though she may be, Chozen Bays reveals her lack of need to confront fat karma.

In his foreword to the book, Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to "our disordered relationship to food and eating." I thought, wow, that's just what I've been saying. I think we have a societal eating disorder, and it just seems to be getting worse. Mindfulness practice applied to eating is very useful to get us back in touch with our bodies' true needs. It helps peel back and erase those disordered relationships.

Unfortunately, in my view Chozen Bays still buys into some of those disordered relationships. I found it slightly problematic that rather than enjoy her discovery of the tastiness of Krispy Kreme donuts, she treated it as a cancerous thought of sorts. On first encounter, she, as she viewed it, mindlessly gorged on them, then obsessed over them while she denied herself further indulgences. Her account of making a particular candy difficult to retrieve also seemed to participate in the control found in restrictive eating and diet culture. When she claimed a healthy respect for those of us who are fat because her partner made a joke about her size, and her clothes got a little tighter, it didn't sit well with me. This was participating in the disordered eating culture, not understanding it. She hasn't needed to experience a life in a fat body, and while I know her to be a compassionate Buddhist teacher, I would doubt she truly understands this karma.

Most problematic to me was her casual mention of a Mindful Eating workshop participant. This participant was taking the workshop in order to prepare herself for her necessarily changed eating style after her bariatric surgery. Like many physicians, Chozen Bays accepts the validity of this surgery, and gives no further comment. She, it seems to me, mindlessly accepts the cultural paradigm that fat is bad, so bad that it is ok to endorse a surgery that hinders the body's ability to function normally for the rest of a person's life. This is if it doesn't actually kill you.

While there are some messages in this book I would not want to endorse, especially the controlling aspect, I do like the detailed instruction on how to eat mindfully. For people who've been immersed in the diet culture that forces us to ignore our own signals of our bodies, this method brings you back to that body, mind, emotional, and spiritual awareness.

Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight by Linda Bacon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this after reading "Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat." It made me like that other book less, because this one covered all found in the other, but this one came first, and this one helped explain why there were parts of "Eat What You Love" that I found a little problematic.

This author, with her little study that proved that dropping the issue of weight, and concentrating on self-esteem, self-acceptance, and learning to trust the signals of the body and the mind actually works better than a conventional diet to improve health factors, well, this author is a David to the Goliath giant of the weight loss industry.

I've read The Obesity Myth and Taking Up Space, among others. If there were one book I would recommend on getting over fat phobia and finding a true path to health, this would be it. (Though those are good to pick up too. Both are especially good for understanding how this whole fat/food issue has its roots in culture, not health.)

Recovery from the diet paradigm includes learning to listen to the body's signals of hunger and satiety, and this is covered very well. It also includes understanding the economic and the cultural forces involved in supporting the diet paradigm, and this book covers that as well. (funding and oversight of studies being heavily intertwined with the weight loss industry; agricultural subsidies driving the production of processed food)While the author sends us to her website for further support and information, this book can truly stand alone as a guide to recovering from the damage of the diet paradigm.

View all my reviews >>

Happy Holidays

2009-12-24T01:11:00.000-08:00

May all beings be happy, healthy, and loved.

Slow Read: Swann's Way, Week 8, conclusion

2009-12-05T22:08:00.000-08:00

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics) (v. 1)
by Marcel Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff

Part Three: Place-Names: The Name

How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us—of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound...The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy

Names are imbued with his impressed imagination from a few clues about that name. So yet again the name of the book looms significant. "Swann's Way" was about a place, a particular memory on a particular walk and the girl first encountered there, about Swann and his love, and a love significantly similar for that little girl. Yet these examples he has, Parma, Balbec, and so on, had such significance based on nothing but imagination and a hint or two of the reality. To put it in an extreme way, those loves could be said to be like that also.

All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs of apparent coldness towards me, which might have shaken my faith that I was for her a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilberte.

A love like Swann's...is that Swann's way?

But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist, apart from ourselves; that, allowing us, at the most, to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered us its blessings in an order in which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of a confession a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed, I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was artificial and without value, that bore no relation to the truth, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to follow.

Suddenly I would stop, in alarm. I had realised that, if I was to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words,—the dearest, the most desired—from the field of possible events.

There is an effort to resist the relentless track, but it is fairly futile.

They would ask one another, "Who is she?", or sometimes would interrogate a passing stranger, or would make a mental note of how she was dressed so as to fix her identity, later, in the mind of a friend better informed than themselves, who would at once enlighten them. Another pair, half-stopping in their walk, would exchange: "You know who that is? Mme. Swann! That conveys nothing to you? Odette de Crecy, then?" "Odette de Crecy! Why, I thought as much. Those great, sad eyes... But I say, you know, she can't be as young as she was once, eh? I remember, I had her on the day that MacMahon went."

I suspected Mme. Swann might be Odette, but the time frames have been murky, and I thought also it might be possible Swann had recovered his love addiction and moved on to someone else. I find myself wondering, was this supposed to be a great love story, or a tragic one? When Odette was losing her figure suddenly, was she pregnant? If so, whose baby was Gilberte? Did Swann then marry her out of chivalry? Did his love finally win her over after he'd finally felt over her, and her baby was legitimately conceived? I suspect now there are all kinds of code words and phrases going on that are no longer used so I didn't catch them.

I further wonder, was it in the very giving up of his love that Swann was hooked? Was it then that Odette said the little thing that folded him in again, as to an addiction to a pain without which he'd no longer have a clear identity?

Related to the Celtic belief he sited, the narrator felt the past could not be recaptured with volition. Only if we chanced upon some link it might open back up to us. So this whole book, a chance re-awakening? And in that unfolding blooms larger and more vividly perhaps, full of romantic wishes.

On the Bois de Boulogne, seeing the people strolling there, the elegance of Mme. Swann and those days, lost:

They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena—an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

Is he saying that we create the divine spark through our creative memory?
the end:

...helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

Previous posts:
Schedule
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Weeks 5 and 6
Week 7

Slow Read: Swann's Way, Week 7

2009-11-27T23:58:00.000-08:00

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics) (v. 1)
by Marcel Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff

Part Two: Swann in Love

I'm 90% through and finally the good stuff happens. Sure, the writing has been good, the use of flowers as people was lovely, and music as a touchstone for love a sweet touch, but it did go on. Now that it's getting somewhere, I wonder, would it be as good, this end of Swann's Love, if we hadn't had all that came before? I'd like to say for Proust's sake that the long lingering over Swann's swoon of denial made the emergence that much more sharp, but I think we could have had the same impression without a couple or a few of those rounds. On the other hand, today's authorial practice of never ever putting a bit in the writing unless it furthered the story has gone too far in the other direction. Proust is creating a mood, a feeling, and a venue, and it does work.

Just an aside:

(though people now thought of it, by the same mental process which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music of which one has read the programme, or the 'likenesses' in a child whose family one has known: "He's not positively ugly, if you like, but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that smile!" realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the invisible boundary which divides, at a few months' interval, the head of an ardent lover from a cuckold's)

Does everybody know but Swann? Swann doesn't only because he doesn't want to, quite yet.

These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which Odette now adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him suffer; but he did not realise how much he suffered; since it had been with a regular progression, day after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. Now this change was his deep, his secret wound, which pained him day and night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it, he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a vague way: "There was a time when Odette loved me more," but he never formed any definite picture of that time.

Love growing, peaking, then dying, what a topsy-turvy time. Poor Swann. But he won't ever again be fooled in quite this way, I bet. He finds himself at a gathering which includes his set. There are fine little examples of the ways in which young folk cast off the tastes of their elders.

Mme. de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She knew that her young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new and noble family, except in such matters as related to the intellect, upon which, having 'got as far' as Harmony and the Greek alphabet, she was specially enlightened) despised Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian, who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own contemporaries, Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite memories and sensations.

But then, Wagner will go out of fashion, and a younger set will re-discover Chopin, just as Sting replaced the Rolling Stones, and each has been replaced and come around again.

Mme. de Gallardon, with a stern countenance and one hand thrust out as though she were trying to 'force' a card, began with: "How is your husband?" in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the Prince had been seriously ill. The Princess, breaking into a laugh which was one of her characteristics, and was intended at once to shew the rest of an assembly that she was making fun of some one and also to enhance her own beauty by concentrating her features around her animated lips and sparkling eyes, answered: "Why; he's never been better in his life!" And she went on laughing.

Just as the Verdurins, who apparently are Bohemians, had well-rehearsed spontaneity, so too do the elite.

"Listen, and I'll explain," she began to Mme. de Gallardon. "To-morrow evening I must go to a friend of mine, who has been pestering me to fix a day for ages. If she takes us to the theatre afterwards, then I can't possibly come to you, much as I should love to; but if we just stay in the house, I know there won't be anyone else there, so I can slip away."

And the Princess, just like the mistress.

"...It's only when I see you that I stop feeling bored." Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way of looking at the little things of life—the effect, if not the cause of which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and even of pronunciation. This similarity was not striking because no two things could have been more unlike than their voices. But if one took the trouble to imagine Swann's utterances divested of the sonority that enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one found that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they had the 'tone' of the Guermantes set.

I wonder if Swann fell in love because Odette was not of his set. The unfamiliarity blinded him to clues to her duplicity. The exotic differences, exciting, enticing, perhaps even dangerous. The Princess is familiar.

Of that tune, Swann's and Odette's, their song, unexpectedly encountered:

Swann felt that it was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed him, light, soothing, as softly murmured as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form.

...ever since, more than a year before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had been born, and for a time at least had dwelt in him, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind

I wonder if music has become, to Swann, as flowers are to the narrator. Perhaps not, as Swann discovered this through love, whereas the narrator had this delicate relationship to flowers before such experiences.

certain great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds.

Was it possible Swann was opened to love, awakened, by this song? Like enlightenment, I believe love can be a sudden opening to that great emptiness through which we are all connected. This opening of the heart is facilitated by a readiness and a convergence of the moment. A phrase of music could open it that final crack, or a turn of phrase, a clap, a snap of the fingers, like a blossom burst open by a gust of wind.

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.

Sounds rather Buddhist with a pinch of god-stuff. Love sparks the divine connectedness. Oh, that sounds like Rumi.

So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what Vinteuil had done for the little phrase.

For lack of a better expression we create angels. Could it be enough to Recognize the interconnection across Emptiness? (I do not say abyss for the negativity associated with it.) A friend of mine has said he sees art as people sharing their experience of samadhi. Something in the art then seems to spark a universal recognition of this mastery of Truth.

Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest movement might embarrass the magic presence, supernatural, delicious, frail, that would so easily vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed of speaking. The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed.

A sublime moment, Swann was not alone in sensing the divine through the music.

From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now.

He is now ready to emerge from the madness that was his love. It allowed him to experience this sacred moment, led up to it, yet experiencing this also brought him through to a sanity regarding his love that he couldn't access before. ....yet he does go on with some more dying obsessions. This is what happens, isn't it, my friends who have loved so heart-breakingly thoroughly? We have these moments of clarity, but still that wicked obsession sends us down a well-worn track, looking again for clues and markers that assure us there was indeed something there, this love wasn't just one-sided, that other one that has turned cold, but they participated, they did. When this happens to you, my friend, avoid that other person at all costs. I know you want to rub that raw place again, be near that other one, but don't. Allow some time and space. So too should have Swann.

No doubt Swann was assured that if he had now been living at a distance from Odette he would gradually have lost all interest in her, so that he would have been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have had the courage to remain there; but he had not the courage to go.

Friends of those love-spurned who do not have this courage, help them find it! Try to convince them it is for their own good to stay away from that love interest. Maybe nothing can be done. Be gentle. But the sooner removed, the sooner that heart can heal and get on an even keel. Still, there is some need, like picking at a scab, to confront and pin down.

He went to see Odette. He sat down, keeping at a distance from her. He did not dare to embrace her, not knowing whether in her, in himself, it would be affection or anger that a kiss would provoke. He sat there silent, watching their love expire. Suddenly he made up his mind.

He pushed her for details of her lies, and discovered over and over ways she had played him that he didn't expect. Someone should have stopped him. Or maybe he had to be exposed, then he could be inoculated from any further what-ifs.

He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the utterly spiritless creature which these crushing words had made of him. And so, even in the months of which he had never dared to think again, because they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was already lying to him!

Here's where it gets interesting to me. Like Swann, or Proust, I too examine love for its shape, its manifestations, its universal entity:

For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them, single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann's love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.

So don't feed those identity beasties, the ones that are so painful, at least. Turn away, in small ways if that's the only way you can, if you must, if there is no hope. Don't put yourself through this agony, as Swann did. It is altogether too tempting to walk these paths again:

And Swann felt himself overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme. Verdurin (and almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described, now, as love), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with loving eyes.... But now, to the faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in his desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.

Dream sequence, seems significant. To visit, go here, and use a find search for "He was mistaken." (wow, a short sentence, how about that?) Swann's self-analysis of the dream has quite a modern psychological understanding.

his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected, which were already being brought to birth,—the exact balance between which was too difficult to establish—were linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity.

We modern American Buddhists like to use the word interconnected, but I wonder if this word, new to me, concatenation, does the job?

Odette's pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which—in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her—he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy.... ...he cried out in his heart: "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!"

Finally! Swann is recovered. Boy, I hear ya, Swann. I've been there. Inoculated now.

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Weeks 5 and 6