Thanks to @randomspaces for the idea. Feel free to print or distribute.
¶ The Moon
These photos were taken 40 years ago tonight, probably by my father but conceivably by my uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother, about 14 months after they arrived to the United States from Argentina.
To set the scene: Genji is the emperor’s son, but of the wrong mother, so he’ll never be emperor himself (but he’s the coolest, best-looking guy around, so pretty much everybody loves him and wishes he could be emperor instead of his brother). His mother was his father’s favorite, and she dies while Genji is a boy, leaving the emperor distraught. He finds a much younger woman to replace her—she enters the story at 16 when Genji is 11—and Genji takes a liking to her. A very strong liking.
Her name is Fujitsubo. Her gentlewoman is Ōmyōbu. Now, some years later, Genji is about 18:
Princess Fujitsubo was not well and had withdrawn from the palace. Genji felt deep sympathy for His Majesty, whose anxious distress was evident, but he also ancitipated feverishly now, at last, a chance for himself, and he no longer went out at all. At the palace or at home he spent the daylight hours daydreaming and those after dark hounding Ōmyōbu. How Ōmyōbu brought off their meeting is impossible to say, but to poor Genji even these stolen moments with her seemed quite unreal. To Her Highness the memory of that last, most unfortunate incident was a source of enduring suffering, and she had resolved that nothing of the kind should ever happen again, yet despite her obvious consternation she remained thoughtful and kind, even while she continued to resist him with a profound dignity so far beyond the reach of any other woman that Genji could not help wondering in anguish why it was never possible to find in her the slightest flaw.
How could he have told her all he had to say? He must have wished himself where darkness never ends, but alas, the nights were short now, and their time together had yielded after all nothing but pain.
“This much we have shared, but nights when we meet again will be very rare,
and now that we live this dream, O that it might swallow me!”he said, sobbing; to which Her Highness compassionately replied,
“People soon enough will be passing on our tale, though I let our dream
sweep me on till I forget what misfortune now is mine.”Genji could not blame her for being in such torment, and he deeply regretted having caused it. Ōmyōbu gathered up his dress cloak and so on and brought it to him.
There, did you miss it? You can hardly be blamed if you did. But she’s pregnant on the next page! (There’s no other reference to the “most unfortunate incident,” but there is a translator’s footnote suggesting that “stolen moments” contains a verb for “seeing,” which implies sexual intimacy.)
Shortly later:
Her highness continued to lament the misery of her lot, and meanwhile she began feeling more and more unwell, so that she could not make up her mind to go straight back to the palace, despite a stream of messengers from there urging her to do so. No, she really did not feel herself, and her silent guesses at what this might mean reduced her to despair over what was to become of her.
She rose less and less during the summer heat. By the third month her condition was obvious enough that her women noticed it, and the horror of her fate overwhelmed her. Not knowing what had actually happened, they expressed surprise that she had not yet told His Majesty. She alone understood just what the matter was. Women like Ōmyōbu or her own foster sister, Ben, who had attended her intimately when she bathed and therefore had before their eyes every clue to her condition, did not doubt that something was seriously wrong, but they could not very well discuss the matter, and Ōmyōbu was left to reflect in anguish that her mistress’s fate had struck after all. To His Majesty, Ōmyōbu presumably reported that a malevolent spirit had obscured Her Highness’s condition, so that at first it had gone unnoticed. This was at any rate what Her Highness’s own women believed. His Majesty was deeply concerned about her, and the unbroken procession of messengers from him inspired mingled dread and despair.
But no need to fear, at least so far. I’m only about 200 pages into the 1100-or-so pages of The Tale of Genji, but the little boy has been born, and though the narrator tells us he looks just exactly like Genji, the emperor and everyone else seem to think that since Genji is so damned beautiful, how could anyone else so beautiful fail to look a lot like him? The little tyke even appears to be on the road to becoming emperor himself one day.
(And this book—ostensibly written by a Japanese noblewoman about 1000 years ago—continues to be excellent and entertaining, and of everything I’ve read in the last year would be my most unreserved recommendation to any amateur lover of books.)
There are these people with the remarkable predilection, after having discovered a television show that they like, to get all the DVDs and to make their way through the whole series crazy fast. I’m not one of these people. Two people I follow on Twitter who reported starting on The Wire long after I had finished the first season have now finished the series while I’m still in the middle of Season Four. I have no doubt that it is among the best shows in the history of television, and perhaps it is the very best. And I own the complete set of DVDs. I’m just lousy at regular DVD watching. A dog-eared book on the coffee table or night stand? No problem. Magazine that imposes itself on me, presenting its most recent installment into my mailbox each week or month? I’m scanning the table of contents before making it back up my driveway. The unending flow of blogs regenerating in Google Reader? To the point of distraction and unfortunately beyond, I’m on them. But I just can’t figure out this serial DVD watching. I’d probably do better if I were trying to catch its weekly television broadcast—or even aware of a growing Tivo queue to prune. But it’s always there, neither growing nor diminishing, no urgency at all, tucked away on a shelf. Maybe I should set it out in a more obvious place to get my attention.
I’ve got a few weeks away from school, so maybe I’ll finally finish. I would like to go back to the beginning, but maybe that’ll have to wait awhile.
Thoughts on seasons two and three:
(1) Most intriguing and perhaps most unlikely character: Brother Mouzone. Where can such a man come from, and can he even be? A neatly-dressed, bow-tied and jacketed, eloquent Muslim killer-for-hire who reads all the same magazines I do. The allusion seems to be, at least superficially, to the Nation of Islam (or perhaps their paramilitary wing), but no such affiliation is ever mentioned by name; and his showing up to provide muscle for a drug operation doesn’t seem to be a good fit. I immediately wondered about his background, about the world that could have produced a Brother Mouzone, and hoped the series would be up to exploring it, but it seems not to be.
Ah, but they do say where he is from: New York. Of course. And he is thus one more facet (maybe the plainest, actually) of the nebulous but recurring role of New York City on the periphery of The Wire (and of Baltimore?). In Brokeback Mountain—I don’t remember whether the movie or the short story or both—either Jack or Ennis wonders exasperatedly what people do who find themselves in their situation, and the other says he doesn’t know, they must go to Denver or something. Denver might be Athens or Babylon, it’s fairly close but strangely far away, quite like here and full of people from here but bigger than here and more complicated and mysterious and maybe frightening, and just as much of the rest of the world as of here, or maybe where the rest of the world and here meet, so really not like here at all. This might be something like the relation people have with nearby cities everywhere; but Baltimore is itself a city, its inhabitants not rural people, and yet something like this relation seems to be what the hazy presence of New York City on the horizon means in The Wire. And of course Brother Mouzone is from there. I want to know about his world, but The Wire just places it in New York and doesn’t have the audacity to go there. I suppose he stands in for the bigness of the world, and for the non-exhaustiveness of The Wire‘s depiction of it—that the Barksdale empire should have connections all the way to NYC and to people like Brother Mouzone!—but I’m not sure whether to think his mysteriousness is a strength of the show, or if its inability to account for him is a weakness and its appeal to him a gimmick. I do want to like him, in either case.
(2) After my growing excitement and awe over the first season, my first impression of the second, taken together, is that it seems to be less of a whole. This is one reason I want to go back to the beginning, since I’m not sure whether this impression is accurate or an artifact of viewing the first season without many expectations and then placing the second into the context of the first. But it seemed to me that the show could have finished after the first season and been a complete entity, and an admirable work of art, while the second season had a different rhythm and sent out more narrative threads. It occurred to me that the first season, at least in outline, might have been made without expectation of continued funding, but that the second season was anticipating the continuation of the series. I don’t know whether it happened that way, but that’s how it felt to me. At the end of the first season, the second might never have come, or it could have come and done anything; at the end of the second, I thought I could tell basically how the third would have to start.
(3) The feds are generally presented as being hyper-competent, having unlimited money and resources, and being utterly uninterested in what’s going on locally. Their distance, their powerful but transient influence, their mysterious depths and mostly superficial depiction, make their role not entirely unlike that of New York. (If ever there is anything like a deus ex machina in The Wire, it will be connected either to New York or the feds.)
The way the feds deflate the local investigation into The Greek was maddening, and though it’s not hard to believe that this is often quite how it works in such a vast web of bureaucracies and competing interests, I want to believe there’s a better way. So this guy is helping you with information in your investigation into international terrorism, and he’s under investigation for unrelated crimes by another agency. Tip him off and spoil their investigation, or communicate with that agency? I suppose if you’re dealing with very sensitive stuff you don’t want to create any new possibility for leaks. Also a possibility is that you don’t give a shit about that agency or their investigation. But really? Is this how it has to be? Can there be no better way? (That may be a fairly characteristic reaction to the show in general, I guess.)
(4) In the way that the first season is clearly about the drug trade and the Barksdale empire, and the second is clearly about the longshoremen, the third season is not so clearly about anything. From what I had heard, I anticipated its being similarly focused, but on city politics. It seemed instead to be more like a return to the first season, but with a newly expanded scope. Is this because local politics is by itself less whole and delimited than the drug trade or the docks? Because, quite the contrary, it is too isolated, and would too much change the character of the show? Because the one-season-one-setting paradigm is wrong?
(5) Perhaps the most obvious foray into concrete public policy debate is the “Hamsterdam” plotline. They make it unambiguous several times, someone or other saying in disbelief to Major Colvin, “You legalized drugs.” And despite the unsubtlety of that repeated assertion, I appreciated the subtlety in their depiction. The “legalization” does have immediate and obvious beneficial effects, but they don’t shy away from the ugliness, either, which makes for a more fair-minded look at the problem of drugs and the law than most.
I’m now working my way slowly through Season Four. The understanding of the public school system is remarkable, and not just of the classroom, which movies and television are notoriously bad at. The look of the school, the meetings. Oh, the meetings. Watching the school scenes, after trial-by-fire in Mississippi, is unspeakably bizarre. It manifests physically. I feel dazed and slightly giddy, utterly enthralled. Mary goes noticeably pale and sweaty, and wants to turn it off.
Last weekend Andrew Sullivan’s blog brought to my attention a 2003 Slate article by John Horgan and some additional commentary by Daniel Florien, both of whom take a rather negative (and, I think, dismissive) view of Buddhism. It has been with some interest that I have read the many follow-ups throughout the week, mostly consisting of reader emails to Sullivan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I am not a Buddhist, and my acquaintance with Buddhism is only recent, but I believe that Horgan’s and Florien’s criticisms suggest nothing so much as the unseriousness of their engagement with Buddhism, and though several objections have already been raised by others of Sullivan’s readers, it seems to me worthwhile to formulate and offer to the Internet why I should think as I do — if for no other reason than the opportunity to formulate for myself some of the things I find compelling about the tradition.
First, and as much a disclaimer for what I write here as a point of contention with Horgan and Florien, “Buddhism” is a pretty big tent. I have not read any of the (quite recent) books or writers Horgan mentions — and perhaps his criticisms would be apt if directed at the formulations of those authors — but from having read and taken seriously some hundreds (out of the thousands) of pages of the Pāli Canon, some Nāgārjuna, some Mahāyāna sutras and some early Zen, it is clear that despite some reassurances that underlying principles are the same, not everything called “Buddhism” presents the same character. The contrast is especially stark between the relatively sober Pāli Canon — which represents the oldest surviving (and allegedly original) strand of Buddhism — and some of the much more fantastical Mahāyāna sutras. Horgan’s and Florien’s respective characterizations (and rejections) of, for instance, reincarnation, even if they accurately reflect the positions of some schools of Buddhism (and I am not at all sure that they do), are therefore not accurately reflective of “Buddhism” taken generically.
One of Horgan’s concerns seems to be the role of the supernatural in Buddhism, and it may be especially easy to be confused about this point. It is not at all clear to me what the role of the supernatural in Buddhism is, and my sense is that it is not the same for all buddhisms. To understand why it would be this way, it is helpful to understand something that seems fairly common in Indian religion that may seem peculiar from the perspective of the Abrahamic ones.
I’ve been told a story that might well be exaggerated or apocryphal, but the continued telling of which is nevertheless illustrative. It goes like this: When the Buddhists first arrived in Japan, they went around building stūpas next to the old Shinto shrines. The Shinto priesthood, tolerant though they were, were taken aback by this audacity, but were reassured by the Buddhists that there was no conflict: the Shinto deities were all Buddhists now.
Though it is quite unlike the treatment of idols and false gods by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this feature is not wholly peculiar to Buddhism. In fact, despite Buddhism’s being a “heterodox” (nāstika) teaching — it does not accept the authority of the Vedas, and even denies the Upaniṣadic permanent Self, or Ātman — the Buddha is named in the Gītagovinda and elsewhere within Hinduism as one of the incarnations of Kṛṣṇa, who is an avatar of Viśnu, God-made-flesh.
In addition to Horgan’s suggested reason for the rising popularity of Buddhism in West — that it seems at first blush to be compatible with our “scientifically oriented culture” — this tendency not only to tolerate but to welcome or incorporate other traditions may offer another (and a reason for the rising popularity in the West of Eastern religion generally): people want a spiritual tradition, preferably with the accompanying authority of great antiquity and influence over the culture of a continent, that endorses our attitudes toward diversity. (Even one with sacred scriptures that don’t seem to condemn homosexuality; imagine that!)
It also helps explain the difficult relationship to the supernatural. In some of the oldest Buddhist texts, the Buddha doesn’t seem to have much use for the traditional supernatural ordering of the cosmos, or in fact for “idle speculation” of any sort, but neither does he go out of his way to deny it. And as different schools of Buddhism arose and made their way through Asia, some of them seem to have picked up more and more.
Horgan’s early view that Buddhism is surprisingly compatible with a scientific outlook, or to go further than he, that it is largely naturalistic, is not at all crazy. The Buddha presents himself as a man, not a deity. When nearing death, he chides some of his followers for their attachment to his decaying body, telling them that the Buddha is the Dhamma (or dharma— which is to say law, or teaching, or way-things-are). He arrived at the teaching through careful observation, and calls it a come-and-see-thing. He allows that acceptance of dogma can have some utility, but not that it is sufficient for liberation, and he asserts that one must finally know the truth for oneself. To this end he compares his teaching to a raft, which one must use to reach the other shore, but must not then cling to and drag along forever. (A later Zen exhortation: if you should ever meet the Buddha in the road, slay him.)
Perhaps the central metaphysical claim of Buddhism is that of impermanence, or of conditioned and dependently-arisen nature. Take the life-span of a table: you have dirt, then tree, then lumber, then table, then scrap and firewood or termite food and dust. The start- and end-points here are functional, but otherwise arbitrary, the “transformation” being basically continuous and infinite in both directions. It is for practical considerations that we draw a box around part of that span, take it to be a discrete unity, and call it a table. But this is a purely conventional assertion and not a reflection of the most fundamental reality.
To put it another way: You can give the river a name, but the water is always moving, the banks always eroding, the path and boundaries always shifting, with no permanent substratum giving it unity through time. In the language of Buddhism, to assert that there is thus no river is nihilism (the same term is sometimes translated as annihilationism); to assert that there really is a river, a permanent unity, is eternalism. For the Buddha, the truth of his teaching is neither nihilism nor eternalism, but the “middle way.”
And both nihilism and eternalism are manifestations of clinging — of attempting to reify and make permanent what is conditioned, dependently-arisen, impermanent — and lead to suffering.
It is this understanding that leads to the so-called “denial of the self,” which is more a denial of the permanent substratum, the unity of the Self. I am an aggregate, too, like the table or the river. I am a heap of cells and tissues and desires and cravings and habits and so on. And it is quite easy to deny that the person in a childhood photograph is the same me. I’ve inherited a lot from him, to be sure, but it’s not hard to say that the “I” is different. And though it’s much harder to say this of myself yesterday, the line is arbitrary.
But then what of reincarnation? Horgan has a problem with the idea of a reincarnating “soul,” and also with the notion that “the self is an illusion,” but apparently doesn’t notice that these two doctrines would appear to contradict one another. What is reborn if not a permanent, unifying self?
The answer is not clear, and I suspect it is understood differently by different schools. What is clear is that it is not “me” in the sense I would ordinarily mean. In one book of the Pāli Canon (the Mahātaṇhāsankhaya), when one of the Buddha’s disciples says that it is “this same consciousness” that goes through the round of death and rebirth, the others are scandalized and try to disabuse him of the notion. Finally the Buddha himself says that holding such a view means having “not even a glimmer” of his teaching.
(The notion that reincarnation represents a kind of wishful thinking, or a means of attaining immortality, is a distinctly Western projection. Despite many doctrinal differences amongst the various Indian religionists, the one thing they all agree on is that the round of rebirths is terrible, and the ultimate goal is always some sort of liberation from it, whether understood as permanent transcendent unity with an underlying principle of the cosmos, or simple extinguishment — which is the most literal suggestion of the word nirvaṇa. And even for the orthodox Hindu who does posit a permanent Self, it is not like the popular conception of “soul” in Abrahamic religion, which is a kind of individuality. The Self is a witness, what remains the same in me even if everything about me that can change does. Mine thus looks quite a lot like yours. And indeed, for some schools it is the very same thing.)
There are suggestions that “death” and “rebirth” are happening all the time, within what we would call one human life — always becoming, never being. Of course there may still be a mystical or supernatural component to rebirth, especially within some schools; but when the government of China, in an effort to control Tibetan religion, claims the authority to require approval for reincarnations, and when the Dalai Lama himself suggests holding a public referendum to decide whether or not to reincarnate or perhaps to reincarnate without having died first, one wonders how far off it would be to suggest that Barack Obama is the 43rd incarnation of George Washington. (Or 44th? Some weird metaphysics with Grover Cleveland.)
(And hell, as long as we’re not talking about a real, permanent self, a consciousness, a “soul” in the Christian sense, the worldview would not seem to me altogether mad that saw some sort of “karmic inertia” manifested in Lincoln that is today become incarnate in Obama. Remember that the primary meaning of “karma” is action or deed. But maybe I’m just talking about poetry, now.)
Lastly, I want to acknowledge that Horgan’s concern about holding monasticism as an ideal is, to my mind, his most compelling point. He says, “It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual.” And I suppose I agree with him, though I’m not sure what the path’s being “spiritual” would mean to the Buddha (or what it should mean to me). If this concern is the same as to wonder whether monasticism isn’t a mere fleeing from the richness of life, or if the best life doesn’t rely on some of the very things monasticism precludes, then I suppose I share it.
Nevertheless, though I am not about to leave for Thailand to don the yellow robes, it is not obvious to me as it seems to be for Horgan that the highest station of man requires sex and family. The call of monasticism seems to me neither novel nor shallow. The Buddha claims that he has deeply and thoroughly understood suffering, and also liberation from suffering. He says that the whole of his teaching is in service to this liberation. He says that sex and family life make liberation very difficult to achieve — which seems likely enough — though he does have lay followers; and later tradition does include “householders” who attain buddhahood. I’m not sold, but I am absolutely persuaded that he is worth my time and my careful consideration.