|
January 3, 2005 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 1/18/2005 @ 8:39 am
|
January 3, 2005
Elat Chayyim, Accord, New York
(from Zen Abbot's Journal, Volume 46)
"…. One reason I haven't been writing much here in the journal is that I've been ‘blogging' on the Everyday Zen website. A funny proposition, a blog, an intimate, causal, yet completely public, form. I can't quite figure it out. It's not the same as the ‘message' I write periodically, that also goes out on the Everyday Zen Founder's Letter. It's not newsletter stuff. But also by its nature (in that it's public, it assumes an audience) it's not really a journal, nor is it like a poetry a truth-seeking vehicle, exploring thought and experience. Any sense of an audience always invites manipulation or posing. The blog writing simply can't be as honest, as raw as a poem is (regardless of how much you polish it). Some would say there's always an audience in writing. You're always writing for someone. The ‘ideal reader?' Five colleagues? The Everyday Zen group? Or, ultimately, maybe God- yes, I think I am writing this journal for God. By which I mean, No One, Nothing, into the Void, Space. God is listening but can't hear anything unless I write, so God depends on me. On any of us who expresses himself. On the weblog this is not so much the case."
"Around the dinner table, with my family, sons, brother and his family, Simon's Columbia friend, we discussed blogs. Simon and Jessica, from New York, home of the post-modern youth culture, said they have friends who have secret blogs — yes, public secret blogs in which they bare their souls to millions they do not know and will never meet, while they keep the fact of the blogs secret from their friends. Why? Because what they write in the blog is too personal to be told to their closest friends! They wouldn't want their friends to know this intimate stuff. Yet of course their friends do find out about it and they tell each other, word spreads, and the network of friends is reading the blog avidly, as it were, publically in secret, and keeping this fact a secret from the bloggist, which makes it all the more delicious. Everyone is talking about it, but always confidentially- never mentioning it to the author. A public document, in other words- possibly at least potentially more accessible than any document has ever or could ever have been in the past — which is written and read completely in secret."
|
|
January 1, 2005 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 1/18/2005 @ 8:35 am
|
January 1, 2005
Muir Beach
(from Zen Abbot's Journal, Volume 46)
"Kathie and I were lying down to take a nap after our exciting New Year's Eve (first time I think in twenty eight years we had ever gone out on New Year's Eve) and getting up early to take Jeff and Ellen and Reuben to airport, when Bob Perelman (poet and critic, old pal, from U Pennsylvania now) and Francie Shaw (a painter, his wife) showed up. They'd been trying to call but phone's not working. Delighted to see them and we had snacks and tea and good talk. Why it's worth mentioning: first, all of us were quite mixed up, Bob and Francie from jet lag, K. and I from our partying and not sleeping much, so our conversation was odd — we'd think of things we couldn't remember the words for, and would get lost in the middle of sentences. And this: that our fractured conversation was all the more eloquent in expressing our collective feeling of nervousness and dismay about the state of the world, of U.S. politics especially. Looking at it rationally, and extrapolating into the future from where we are now, we're doomed. Very dark things are bound to happen. One could certainly be in a dark mood about all that, even to the point of terror. Possibly this feeling was there, underneath our amiable and loving conversation. It's rational after all! But (as I said in the conversation) there can be faith still and hopefulness even in a dire situation because the fact is you never actually do know what is going to happen next and extrapolations are always incorrect. What actually happens is never what's anticipated. (Even if it is what happens the texture of actuality is always completely different from the texture of anticipation). Being anxious about the future says a lot about one's present feeling, almost nothing about the future. Miracles happen! So- as I've endlessly been saying to one and all since the disappointing November election — you work for what you think is the best course of action, and you keep on working, trusting in the best outcome, even if it's not the one you planned on. The art of faith is imagination — letting the imagination soar past the possible and expected to the unknown. Also it's an act of imagination to drop your point of view (that, say, the results of all Bush's policies will be disastrous), and try to see differently — that, for instance, what looks like trouble might not be trouble, or that trouble might sometimes be exactly what's needed. History does not proceed by straight lines. Anyway, does anyone know what history actually is anyway? Is it something objective after all? I think history has mysterious roots in the human notion of time (and time is a notion), and pattern of time, no one knows what has happened really — and certainly no one knows what will happen. Still, what has happened and will happen depends on all people with limited viewpoints acting on their best (or worst) impulses — as they will do. As I've got to do. With faith, always, in the future. But it's human to worry. "
|
|
