Spiritual Terms Defined: Realization

The peacock is trying to cross the road.  3 times now he’s charged into the street, lost his nerve, turned around and run back.  I do the same thing.  The people who say I’ll get killed this way are probably right.  I hate to watch the peacock, but I can’t look away.  Every attempt seems certain to be a gruesome tragedy, albeit one gaily decorated with fresh blood and peacock feathers.  

After 3 mad dashes and 3 terrified retreats amid blaring horns and swerving cars, after scaring the crap out of himself, assorted motorists and myself, I see a lightbulb turn on above the peacock’s head and he’s like, oh yeah, I can fly.

What's Not Lost

When I walked up to Only Coffee this morning the #3 dog ran laps around me and the #2 dog came up to be petted.  I was glad to see them and sad just the same, so I dragged a plastic chair out to sit in the dirt by the road, drank my steaming coffee from its steel cup, and tried to explain to myself, again, that this was just the way it works: we lose everything.  

(Actually, it appears there is something we do not lose, which we cannot lose, but this is scandalous, as well as highly controversial and I am still looking into it.)  

I was sitting there, thinking these things, and petting the head of the #2 dog, when my elbow was bumped -- thankfully not the arm holding the coffee -- and at my side appeared the #1 dog: white, brown, black and smart.  She ducked under my left leg and presented her neck to be scratched.  

I set my cup down on the ground and patted her with both hands.  Then, because of a lifelong intolerance to sudden good news, which is not how I was raised, and with which I have never learned to cope, I knew that in another ten seconds I would be dripping with tears, which is just not something one does streetside in Tamil Nadu.

I contrived a quick fix.  Gazing across the mad street and past the sacred banyan, I gazed devoutly upon the sacred hill, Arunachala, as if I were absorbed in contemplation of the very highest matters, as if I’d been struck down by some of those super-big-deal extra-fancy revelations that so often come, in this very holy town, to terribly spiritual foreigners, insights so profound that I had no choice but to weep.

Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life

In every event the entire universe is reflected.

-- Nisargadatta Maharaj

New Small Stories from India, 2015

Consensus

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



Why do I write?  I write because the spiritual people here at the Shanti cafe are currently attempting to reach a consensus about whether or not to turn on the fan.  One individual explains that she suffers from “a wind imbalance” and might thus be maimed by a breeze.  Her friend suspects that she suffers from a wind imbalance too, but she’s not totally sure.  Other people point out that it is May here in Tamil Nadu, nearly 40 degrees Celsius, and that the sensation of sweat dripping ceaselessly from one’s skin is highly unpleasant, regardless of whether the underlying sense of unease they are experiencing is, in fact, a case of sunstroke.

I write because if I just started screaming obscenities it might mean that I am turning into my father.  The sweat rolling off of my hand is causing the paper to buckle.  Although I am praying that they turn on the fan, I am not willing to speak up.  I am worried that my voice might sound agitated -- or much, much too calm.

I have also informed God that I will donate 75 American dollars to charity if a biker walks into the Shanti cafe right now and lights up a big fat cigar.

Cashier

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



It’s the time in late afternoon when the light softens at last and, in the courtyard of the ashram, pilgrims admire the peacocks and share biscuits with the monkeys.  I’m perched with my book on the steps just outside the office of the cashier, watching people come and go with donations and requests.  A small monkey -- a juvenile, male, rather scrawny -- peers into the office doorway and almost enters but then doesn’t.  The monkeys at the ashram are much too tame -- they steal food and scare children.  You’d be wise to give them a wide berth.  Indeed, even as I sit here the guard has come with his stick to ward off the monkeys that lurk by the temple door and tug on the hems of the ladies’ fluttering silks.  This particular monkey goes on lurking beside the door and peering in.  He makes an odd cooing noise.  The cashier, familiar with the antics of monkeys, turns from his computer now and then to keep an eye on him.  People with business come and go.  The monkey dodges their feet.  I expect someone to shoo him away, but nobody bothers, and he just goes on waiting, just outside the door, making the same small, sad, dejected noise, like he needs his mother to be paged on the intercom.  Finally a time comes when there are neither donors nor petitioners.  The cashier stretches, rests his eyes.  He turns to look at the monkey, shakes his head, and sighs.  He opens the second drawer of his desk and extracts a banana.  The monkey enters the cashier’s office, receives the banana and departs.

What's In It For You

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking a moment’s respite from the management of your own micro-celebrity to read this paragraph.  I promise it won’t be a waste!  At the end of this paragraph you are going to be demonstrably more impressive.  Now: if we can just quickly come to the agreement that this is literature.  Why should you decide that, you ask?  Why should you do me that favor?  I’ll tell you: because then you become (instantly!) a person who reads literature.  A sophisticate -- and with hardly any eye strain.  Then you need only select one writer you totally adore: Calvino’s a safe choice, so’s Beckett.  (If you want a woman, it has to be Alice Munro or Elizabeth Bishop.)  Then you choose one writer who is totally overrated: Murakami is a safe bet there.  He has to be overrated, doesn’t he, since he’s so entirely pleasant to read?  There: that was easy wasn’t it?  See how we’ve helped each other out?  Isn’t this a beautiful reason to ardently click ‘like’?  We are now literary people, you and I.  All the more reason to drink and have affairs.  OK, that’s it, we’re done here.  You may now resume dressing for brunch.  You are welcome, too, to photograph yourself reading this paragraph, in a highly sophisticated pose. 

Perfection

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



“I never met anyone who came here earlier than I did,” he says.  “When I first came to the ashram, I was the only foreigner.”  He tells me stories of the saints, one of whom he knew when he was a solitary beggar on the street.  I ask him questions until the dal and veg are cold on his banana leaf.  “You must feel like the universe has shown a particular interest in you,” I tell him.  It sounds fatuous, I know, but I meant it.  Imagine knowing the saints before they were statues, when you could hang around and talk together on street corners.  

“My life has had a few perfect moments,” he says.  “One more story.”  He takes a few bites, clears his throat.  I wait for more news of great souls.

“Perfect moments exist.  They show up now and then.  Like when I was in 6th grade music class.  Awful class.  Taught by a sour old spinster who always made the boys sing stuff like, “I’m stuck on you.”  And what little boy wants to sing that?  Our job was to listen to the record, then try to sound the same.  She was that kind of teacher.  But I guess “I’m stuck on you” was getting old, because that day the needle jumped and the record played I’m stuck -- I’m stuck -- I’m stuck -- I’m stuck -- I’m stuck.

“Seriously, what are the chances of that?  Blew my mind.  I was 12 years old and I thought it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened.  Of course the music teacher had no clue what was so funny, so special.  She had absolutely no sense of anything.”

Soda Waters of Tamil Nadu, In Review

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



In a town as holy as this one, some sins are hard to come by.  No meat, no liquor.  Eggs, too, are a sin -- though I know a couple places you can get one.  The truth is, it doesn’t bother me when multiple venues for sin and distraction have been closed off.  I’m versatile.  I can always find something else about which to obsess.  

Soda water, for example.  In the extreme heat of May, with alcohol prohibited, juice questionable, and sugary sodas nauseating, plain soda water is the best chance for a fleeting sensation of cool.  I sometimes walk, amid the sweltering heat of noon, five blocks along the mad swerving blaring street just for a bottle of soda.

Of the four brands of soda water available here in town, I find that each is entirely different, though it is difficult to say exactly how.  Nonetheless, an attempt has been made.  It is my fondly-held wish that the following will prove useful to other drinkers of soda water, both in Tamil Nadu and beyond. 

Kali’s Club Soda, product of Kalimark (Sipcot, Pallipati)
Small, sharpish bubbles.  A tendency both drying and pebbly.  An unmistakeable though lemon-less sourness.  Highly transient.  Brings to mind a one-night stand with someone who looks good, but with whom you have nothing in common.  Though it really seems like it ought to work, halfway through it is already flat.

Lehar Evervess Club Soda, product of Pepsico (Palakkad, Kerala)
Evenly-spaced bubbles, like small amenable thorns.  Brings to mind delicate blue-green glass beads and the hour of noon.  You can really taste the water!  A sense of reliability one does not generally expect from bubbles.  If this soda water was a tanned teenaged boy, you wouldn’t hesitate to entrust your lawn to him.

Kinley Soda, product of CocaCola (Vellavedu, Tiruvallur)
Insistent bubbles, but with a hint of inconstancy.  Milky and tongue-heavy.  Sustained bitterness, even to the point of gourd-ishness.  Brings to mind a decent man, but with almost no chin, or a sensible person useless in emergencies.

Bisleri Soda, product of Bisleri Intl. (Bangalore, Karnataka)
A net fine enough to catch the smallest fish.  Sandpaper too smooth for the task at hand.  Miniscule bubbles spaced too far apart.  Vegetal notes.  Brings to mind a reputable college and the boy you are supposed to like.  Contains too much water.

Spiritual Terms Defined: Prasad

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



This morning an old woman in the temple offered me prasad. Three Starburst: two lemon and one strawberry.  I accepted them reverently, as though she had offered me an orchid.  Prasad means God’s holy leftovers.  Years ago I stayed in an ashram where the holy mother had told horror stories of bad things happening to people who refused prasad.

“I offered him prasad.  He said, No.  I urged him to take.  He said that it was troublesome to carry bananas on his journey home.  He said he had perfectly good papaya at home.  He resolutely refused!  Not halfway to Chennai he discovered -- all his luggage was stolen!  Billfold also!”

The gentleman’s business later failed.  He developed rheumatism.  One son turned out to be slow.  It is not known if these disasters are related to his refusal of prasad, but it’s certainly possible.

Thus I always line up for whatever prasad is available -- a tiny spoonful of buttermilk, a laddu, a lump of upma, a fresh fig.  Skeptics will say that no one has ever seen me turn down food anyway.

Polaroids

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life

If I were a photographer, I would try to make pictures that looked exactly like the Polaroids people took of birthday parties in the Seventies. Yes, I would work very hard to create images that were completely ordinary. I would always prefer what is flawed. The kind of pictures that might only interest you if maybe you loved somebody. Those are the pictures I would take, pictures most people would think didn’t matter much. No doubt I would still be hurt and indignant that people didn’t realize I was doing something really tremendously special.

My Complaints

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



Why don’t I simplify my life by considering my complaints to be devoid of substance and invalid?  My muesli and yogurt (waiting now while I take note of it) is topped with grapes, almonds, cashews, and glistening red pomegranate seeds.  Yesterday, while I was waiting for the swamis to re-open the holy cave after lunch, a langur came to perch on the nearest tree and supervise my reading of I Am That.  Who is interested in listening to the complaints of such a person?  Not me!  

I Am That has to be one of the most repetitive books in human history.  Maharaj says the same thing over and over and over.  “Just keep in mind the feeling ‘I am’, merge in it, till your mind and feeling become one.”  But have I gotten it yet?  Nope.  Not a chance.

Meanwhile, there’s this person.  He feels badly because he never achieved any success.  Aside from, you know, being gifted with muesli and langurs.  Oh, and he doesn’t much like being 42.  Oh boo fucking hoo.

Destiny

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



Today’s pilgrimage, by auto-rickshaw: a circuit of the 8 holy lingams that surround the holy hill in the company of a professorial gentleman with whom I last evening had remarkably bad sex.  By chance, the lingam is a perfect metaphor for the way the man kissed: his tongue thrust out, hard and immobile from the center of his mouth, like a post.  He stank of onions.  The pic he’d sent in advance of our meeting was not from this century.  In what I resentfully perceive to be the intimate style of rich men, he just lay there immobile with his unwashed hard-on and seemed to think he was doing me a tremendous favor.

Thank god I used to be a whore, I thought.  At least I know how to get through this.  How often has my unwillingness to hurt anyone’s feelings led to actions that were grotesque?  He, too, was conspicuously underwhelmed.  “Your body is basically good,” he said.

Then this morning we had to go and be holy together.  It had all been pre-arranged.  On our holy tour, he maintained an instructional tone, describing each of the lingams in turn.  I admit that lingams have always seemed pretty much the same to me -- there are little ones and then there are big ones -- but it turns out the meaning of each can be entirely different, and especially if they are part of a circuit.  There is one lingam for the sun, one for the air, the stars, the bowels of the earth.  One lingam cures stomach ailments, another prevents childlessness. Others brings fortune, or status, or peace of mind.

As well as detailing the lingams, the rich man revealed his opinion that pradakshina, or circumambulation, was in fact an a prehistoric fitness strategy and that the use of narrow tunnels inspired ancient people to stay slim.  Even as we rode together in the back of the rickshaw, we took care that our knees never touched.  The whole time I felt haunted.  All my life I have loved older men, but now I fear they are too old.

Some people can’t stop washing their hands.  I can’t stop saying thank you, thank you, thank you.  “No need to thank,” the gentleman said.  “It was written on your destiny that today you would do pradakshina.  I am only the tool.”  As if to say that, no, he would never have chosen this trip either. 

On the other hand, I had good reason to be grateful.  I would never have found Indra lingam, buried in the city center.  Esanya lingam, last on the circuit, I had also somehow always missed.  This lingam is in the cemetery and to reach it you must climb down into the Earth.  The man said it symbolized the difficulties attendant to aging and death. 

Among all the lingams, Shiva’s trident is seen only here.  The gentleman made sure I saw the trident, tucked off to the side.  The first time he pointed to it, I pretended I saw, but he kept pointing, again and again, until I saw it for real.

Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life

It is not the theory that matters, but the way it is being tested.  Nisargadatta Maharaj

new small stories from India, 2015

2nd series

Two Containers

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



Last night, in the a/c supermarket at the foot of the holy mountain, I happened to buy two plastic containers.  And I am still hearing about it.  The containers are small, clear, and rectangular, with colored lids.  The smaller one (blue lid) cost 18 rupees and the other, slightly larger, (green lid), cost 30 rupees.  That’s a total of 89.83 Japanese yen or exactly 75 American cents.  After studying the containers, I decided that the smaller one could hold milk powder and the larger, crystallized chunks of palm sugar, or arenga sugar, as it is also known.  I was concerned the blue-lidded container might not hold all the milk powder, but thankfully it did.

Actually I had already finished my shopping and was packing my purchases into a small cloth bag when I noticed the plastic containers with colorful lids stacked just outside the door of the supermarket.  And I coveted them.  But I didn’t just covet them, I also needed them, at least two.  I have ants.  My ants are very, very small, but there are many of them.

Please don’t think that I am someone who takes the purchase of plastic containers lightly.  I am haunted by visions of the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of five major gyres worldwide, and by the likelihood that my plastic containers will one day float there, estranged from their lids, gradually dissolving, lodging plasticine molecules into the bodies of single-celled organisms.  I will try to delay this.  I will keep my containers as long as I can. 

The lids of the containers are durable but the bodies are perhaps flimsy.  I will be careful.  Also the blue-lidded container fits inside the green-lidded container, which is a boon when traveling.  And I am not just telling you this for my own literary purposes.  I checked.

The lids are very snug.  I have confidence in them.  I think that they will prevent any problem with ants.  The ants are on the floor.  They have not yet discovered the shelves, the milk powder, or the chunks of palm sugar.  But no doubt the ants will discover them in time.  After all, the ants are thinking of nothing else.

Overall, I am satisfied with my plastic containers.  The blue-lidded one rests nicely on top of the green-lidded one on the shelf beside my metal cup and spoon, my electric kettle and glass jar of Sunrise instant coffee with chicory.  I have very few possessions.  Everything I own fits into a single suitcase.  These objects are important not because they are mine, but because almost all of them will last longer than I will, longer than this body which is not an airtight container, which does not close tightly, which is flimsy.

I would like to give the future small stories.  Instead I am giving the future small plastic containers.  Plastic lasts longer than stories.  So far nothing has evolved which can digest it.  I live simply, so as to give the future as little indigestible stuff as possible.  Also, living simply is said to be an aid for establishing a quiet and serene mind, which I reckon to be true in general, but not always.

Dog Biscuits

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life



Like most foreigners in this holy town, I carry a small cloth shoulder bag I purchased at the ashram which identifies me, officially, as a serious spiritual aspirant.  In my spiritual bag, I carry dog biscuits.  They are chicken-flavored, even though I am a vegetarian and this is a pure-veg town.  Honestly I tried vegetarian dog biscuits, but every one of the Tamil street dogs to whom I offered one sniffed at it, then looked at me in a way which I interpreted to mean:

“Even though times are tough right now, they are still not tough enough for me contemplate choking down one of those.  Don’t forget that I still have the option of garbage.”

Thus I feed chicken-enhanced biscuits to all my favorite dogs -- the two charismatic pups at Only Coffee, the pack of mutts that roam Post Office road, as well as any I find lying in the dust alongside the murderous main street.  Cats will also eat the biscuits, if you can get close enough to one.  Monkeys, cows and peacocks will at least consider them and not think less of you for offering.

Along with all these animals, so effortless to love, I also feed my number one least favorite dog: a nasty hound, bleached with age and meanness, who snarls and barks at me like he’s going to take my leg off as I stroll past on my way to score some muesli fruit curd at the green and leafy Shanti Cafe.  He appears to be the oldest dog in town, but he must brush and floss every day because he has the whitest pointiest dog teeth in town.  Like bleached shark’s teeth.

Needless to say, I don’t get too close when I feed him.  From across the quiet narrow lane I lock eyes with him as he barks.  Then I bend down and pour a handful of biscuits onto a stone step and slowly walk away.  

The very first time I did this, the dog stopped barking abruptly, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say.  Now, every day when I walk past, he still barks at me, but his bark is different than before.

It pleases me very much that his bark is now very audibly confused.

What Do I Tell Them?

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life

Circumambulating the shrine of the saint, I contemplate the one great matter. My eyes are open just a crack, enough to walk, enough to catch a glimpse of my old friend Hannah -- we flash surreptitious grins and signal. Chai? Ten minutes? Whenever. Three minutes later we’re across the street on folding chairs with cups of chai, surrounded by a small audience of beggars we’ve also known for ten or twenty years. Turns out I’m very lucky to get to see Hannah. In 3 days she will return to Switzerland, her native place, to which she has rarely returned since coming to India in 1980. Her mother is very elderly now and she worries dementia may be setting in. “Every night after dinner she watches a movie, that is fine. But my sister says that for the last month it has been the same movie every night and she does not seem to notice.” “How does it feel to go back?” I ask. “It will be difficult,” Hannah says. “It is Spring. It will be beauty-full. The city is grand and clean. But then there are people, and they ask questions, and what do I tell them?” She gestures around us at the temple and the roaring street, at the beggars and sadhus and peacocks and cows, at the street dogs and dour-faced foreign devotees, at India. “People want to know what I do,” she says. “What do I tell them? Do I say that I walk clockwise around statues, temples and hills? Do I say that I practice simply being, or that I just try to be quiet?” She shrugs. “Usually I tell them I work at the animal shelter. I haven’t worked at the animal shelter in years, but you have to tell them something.” We imagine explaining to a roomful of Swiss professionals, “Every time my mind wanders, I ask myself, To whom does this thought occur? To me. And who am I?” We end up giggling, but the truth is it’s hard to go back. It shouldn’t matter what other people think, but it does. We agree that people respond in one of two ways. There are people who feel envy, because they somehow imagine that I have my life and their life too. Like I am on an extended vacation and I will one day return to a magical home where I have all the things that they do: house, spouse, career, truck, dog, garden, phone, benefits, TV, stereo, fishing gear, power tools, storage unit, time share, photo albums, memorabilia, old friends calling out as they walk in carrying beers. People don’t understand that the price of this life was that one. The second category of people assume that I am pathetic, self-indulgent, or mad. On my bad days I team up against myself with those people, the noxious clan that lives primarily but not entirely within one’s own mind, a parasitic psychic worm one might as well call the Inner Facebook. “But we cannot judge anyone those people either,” Hannah reminds me. “The ones who stay in the West. Because their lives seem freak-ish to us too, isn’t it?” “In the United States of America, many people sacrifice everything in the hope that they will one day be elderly in Arizona.” We shake our heads in bewilderment. The American faith is a strange one. “It doesn’t matter if I feel like a freak in Switzerland,” Hannah says. “I must help my mother. She was a good mother. She helped me to stay in India.” By now we’ve given up and bought chai for several of the beggars standing around us. Because they really are going to stand there, hand out, for as long as it takes. Several ashrams provide meals, but everyone needs tea. I fall into my usual complaints about America, like the way every conversation starts What do you do? Hannah interrupts me. “Yes, it’s irri-tating. But look at it this way. In a way it makes sense, the way people talk. What are we doing here? We have 80 or 90 years, perhaps much less. What do you do? What do you do? What do I do? Could someone please tell me what do I do? “Yes, maybe they want to feel they made the right choice, that we are freak-ish to fly away to India but -- in fact we are all just trying to figure it out. What do you do? What do I do? What does anyone do?”

Geckoes

from Small Stories from My Enormously Spiritual Life

for Marco

A thunderstorm so strong -- I’d rather just stay here on the floor, thank you.  I had been doing crunches on the bed, then the bicycle, my feet kicking the air, beside the open window with its metal frame, as the rain poured and the lightning flashed, when I had a vision of my death so embarrassing that I chose to retreat down to the cool pink faux marble tiles.

These heavy rains are not seasonal.  But then, I suppose seasonal is fast becoming a useless word.  Climate change will render it archaic.  The adverb unseasonably will be used only by tired and disapproving traditionalists -- the same bitter queens who claim that promiscuity is now passé because they are no longer invited to orgies.

As I watch the downpour -- and flinch with every flash of light -- a gecko dashes through a gap in the corner of my window and darts down to the floor, where we occupy opposite corners.  Then another flash, another gekko.  The storm continues this way, yielding a parade of geckoes.

Welcome geckoes, we are in full agreement.  Help yourselves to ants, there’s plenty.  It never occurred to me that geckoes might be afraid of storms.  There are now approximately ten geckos in my room.  I am happy they are here.  They help me to feel safe somehow.  Also, I am not so embarrassed to be here on the floor because, if the geckoes are doing it, then surely it is a good idea?

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Aldous Huxley, Island

Aldous Huxley, Island
Harper & Row, 1962

As I read ‘Island’ I thought, “Wow, this is just the book for the world as it is right now” -- and I assume that readers have felt that way for all of the fifty-plus years this book has been in print.

‘Island’ is a tribute to the care and attention that is possible even now, as Big Oil, Wanton Destruction, Fake Spirituality and Sheer Nonsense roll in with their final victory, their FINAL final victory, bigger even than yesterday’s final victory.  Appreciation and real care remain not just possible but inescapable -- at least for those who are paying attention.

This book is intensely full: so many ideas, griefs, hopes, plans, theories, varieties of mischief.  It’s easy to imagine Huxley, terminally ill by this time, saying, “What the hell!  I’m putting it all in.”  Thus it’s natural that ‘Island’ succeeds far better as a mass of ideas, passions and energy than as a traditional plotted novel.  Seamlessness and efficiency are not the point.

I enjoyed this book a lot, was glad I read it, and this is despite loathing the first chapter, disliking the second, and thinking, “Oh, no.  Oh, God.  He must have been fond of D.H. Lawrence.”  (Yep, I guessed right...)  When, in the midst of the drama, we are treated to 35 pages on Huxley’s educational theories, I wanted to say, “Aldous!  Dude!  Reconsider!”

I ended up cheering the book because Huxley is so daring and so determined to include everything -- death, disease, loss, fury, grief, as well as five dozen theories, and the nature of ultimate reality -- you know, in case you had any lingering doubts about the nature of ultimate reality.  A dying man, he clearly used this book to instruct himself how to die.  To me, that’s stunning.

One more thing: nowadays it often seems that Huxley is the private property of New Age spiritual types -- after all, Eckhart Tolle refers to this book.  Thus, I was surprised to discover that there is nothing Huxley is better at than exposing the delusions, self-aggrandizement and sheer madness of self-proclaimed spiritual people.  Chapter 5, with its scary and hilarious portrait of the Rani, is the crown jewel of this novel.  I assume that Huxley meant to lampoon Theosophical types, as well as the devout ladies who clustered around the Vedanta Society in the mid-20th century.  I was chagrined to discover that the Rani seemed exactly like many of today’s New Agers and Neo-Advaitins.  (Like Huxley, I attempt to navigate contemporary Buddhist and Hindu traditions without becoming either nuts or a jerk.  It ain’t easy.)  To judge from Huxley’s portrait of the Rani, it appears that self-delusion has not needed to learn any new tricks -- the old tricks still work just fine.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

Édouard Levé, Autoportrait
translated by Lorin Stein
originally published in French in 2005
Dalkey Archive, 2012


In the noble and under-utilized lineage of Sei Shonagon and Joe Brainard, here is Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait.  Each sentence is a fresh start, “I” is the touchstone, but the point is not so much to trumpet the self as to endlessly give it away.  Like Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”, Autoportrait is an act of generosity, an intimate act.  Here is the self, its memories, habits and preferences, endlessly raveling and unraveling, appearing suddenly and disappearing to make way for whatever is next.

Autoportrait is 117 pages of unbroken text.  It may be daunting to not see a paragraph break, a place to take a breath, but this book is utterly and helplessly readable -- the only trouble is when you try to stop.  

On page 9 Levé writes, “In India, I traveled in a train compartment with a Swiss man whom I didn’t know, we were crossing the plains of Kerala, I told him more about myself in several hours than I had told my best friends in several years, I knew I would never see him again, he was an ear without repercussions.”  Reading Autoportrait is just like that -- I felt I was that man on the train, intimate from the start, hearing Leve’s memories, preferences, anguishes and tics in a rush.  (He mentioned never having had gay sex so frequently I wanted to tell him, “Come here, sweetheart, let’s tic that box already.”)

When I reached the end I wished there was more, so immediately I read it again.  After reading it twice -- because Levé writes he would be glad to live his life a second time but not a third -- I wished that this could become an established and recognized form: “the autoportrait” in honor of Leve.  It seems to me that the autoportrait is in some ways superior to the memoir, because it is closer to life than the story of it.  The autoportrait presents the “I” as it actually is -- an unstable, flickering, changeable multitudinous semblance, instead of one big unified project.  Think of how much better we would understand people and eras if we could sprinkle across time people like Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Edouard Levé, and if autoportraits could be written, instead of the inherently misleading memoir: Chapter One, My Highly Promising Childhood.  

Inevitably, I had to try writing an autoportrait of my own and, sure enough, once the process got underway it seemed to turn to turn up much that was fresh and alive, as well as truths seldom glimpsed in the “official” version of me and who I’d like to think I am.  (* If anyone else has tried this, or knows others who have, I would like very much to read the result -- please contact me!)  

This book is unnervingly poignant because it appears to include both Levé’s suicide and how it might have been averted.  I am certain that reality was not so simple but reading this I could not help but wish that I could hurry back in time to 2007, to the final ten days between when Leve delivered his final manuscript (“Suicide”) and when he ended his life.  “Excuse me, sir, here is your ticket to India, it’s business class but you must leave tonight.”  

As that is not possible, we are left with this brilliant and fascinating small book, crammed with digressions, illuminations, and possibilities.  May it be read and emulated.

Who Will Save the Stories of Lucia Berlin?

Lucia Berlin, So Long
Black Sparrow Press, 1993

When I was 23 years old this was my favorite book.  Then as now, I was peculiarly strict about what should be read when and where -- there were books for the morning or the afternoon, for dawn, sunset or midnight.  There were the books that were right when accompanied by two strong cups of coffee, by casual distraction or complete exhaustion.  There were books that were right for the toilet, for the cafe, or for the bus.  So Long was the only book I had that I felt I could be read anywhere, at any time.  Even when I read it in the nightmarish waiting room of Denver’s public health clinic, this book didn’t condescend to me, it always granted to me its kind, funny, sad, wise company.

I discovered the stories of Lucia Berlin in the classroom of the legendary Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who had been a friend of Lucia’s and said that her writing was a hidden American literary treasure.  For months I carried this book everywhere and read it all the time.  I adored it.  Almost twenty years later, I reread the stories and -- Bobbie spoke the truth.  These stories are a treasure.  Like Chekhov or Saramago, these stories are profound instructions in the practice of compassion.  Anyone who reads and reveres Grace Paley or Alice Munro has got to read these stories -- but how are they are going to be able to do that?  The Black Sparrow Press books were heroic undertakings but they are fragile books and increasingly hard to acquire.  These are brilliant stories -- how are people going to be able to find them?

When I started rereading this book, I could find no evidence of a rescue mission, a book in the works.  Lucia died more than ten years ago now.  The neglect of her work since then seems as universal as it is senseless and maddening.  Checking again a few weeks later, I am astonished.  I find rumors that Macmillan is going to publish a Selected Stories of Lucia Berlin titled A Manual for Cleaning Ladies with an introduction by none other than Lydia Davis.  If this is true, then it is magnificently good news.  If the project flounders, we will be guilty of allowing the stories of an unsung American master to disappear.  May the rumors be true!  I hope very much that the re-discovery of the stories of Lucia Berlin is, at last, about to commence.