The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is… that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.

–Nietzsche

There is a part of the North American ethos–”the pursuit of happiness”–has a diabolical subtext…

:::happiness is the endgame:::

Most of our films, novels, and pop-mythology centers around a “protagonist” that is looking to be happy. Pro = positive. Agonist = one who agonizes. A higher hero is someone who agonizes under the weight of some mythic discipline, because, for him, there is no alternative. His endgame is to be part of the re-creation of the world. Happiness is the indicator that he’s on the right track.

Obsession with happiness can often obliterate and confound our vision–set us adrift, and send us freewheeling into the depths of grouchy navel-gazing.
–

Something happened to our operating software moved to Colombia. Most people–especially the poorer folk–rarely talk about happiness. But they smile, inwardly and outwardly, and seem at ease with the life, the world, the cosmos. We had a doorman named Jairo, who was nascently brilliant. He’d zip around Edificio Laureles and find something, constantly, to do…as a portero, a doorman, a gatekeeper, a man (who could), sit around and lock and unlock doors.

He fixed old phones and blenders, polished the stairs–he also taught me Spanish by listening to the words I was trying to say, and “shadowing” (echoing) my words in proper, Colombian Spanish. This is high-level listening and speaking. Jairo had every reason to rage, rage, against the constructs of his existence (I am a brilliant doorman, and the world sucks because it cannot see my raging talent!).

"Iglesia Nuestra Mujer del Café," Quindío, Colombia

But he was happy. He showed me pictures of his daughters, which were on his antique 1mg cameraphone. He’d find the flowers that grew like weeds and decorate the building. He seemed truly interested in that we lived in the Coffee Axis of the cocaine capital of the western world. He, like many Colombians, had this downbeat-but-caffeinated contentment in the company of subtropical heliconias, blue morpho butterflies, cloud forests, and banana-tree smattered coffee plantations.

I have thought long and hard about the secret of guys like Jairo, and I think one of them is the very idea that they don’t focus on happiness too much. They focus on discipline–may focus on obedience to a higher power. This keeps them out of the center of the universe, and keeps them relatively free from los siete piensamentos mortales (the seven deadly ways of thinking). [We lived by "Our Lady of the Coffee" church, so I think their "high power" percolated with coffee, Mary, and the Catholic trinity...no matter. They knew nature was "for them, but not about them."]
–
Moments of happiness–even hours (!)–are the result of discipline and obedience. Discipline and obedience implies that our lives have significance. Pleasure alone provides no platform of significance. We become very powerful in our discipline. In the cases of moral outliers like Joan of Arc, Mohatmas Ghandi, et al, we usually see a “long obedience in the same direction.”

Happiness is a pleasant reminder that our projects, whether great or “small,” are echoing joyfully through the cosmos.

The beatific vision

August 6, 2011

alumbrado

18 Comments

WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY I was running on the trails beside the San Elijo Lagoon with my cattle-dog, Gunner. It was the hour before the gloaming, the weather was perfect, and time suspended. The lagoon lingered with the wild beauty of the Pacific Ocean and calmly retained the mystic fog, buffered by the chaparral jungles, the Torrey pines, with trails set beside water. Nearby they’d launched hot-air balloons, and all looked like some kind of Chagall dreamscape.

In that moment, when all had come together, I nearly lost all sense of myself. I felt the cool wind; all I could see was bathed in an ambient pink-orange; I felt alive and entirely out-of-time; I wanted to be fully absorbed into the presence and imminence of that moment.

Neurologists will tell me I was high on endorphins and my synapses were fire-hosing atomic happiness. Even so, at that moment, I know there was some meta-atomic beatific vision that embodied and empowered the chemical and geophysical moment of paradise.

Just as soon as I realized I was lingering in the deeps, I bent into a paroxysm of panic. I became crazily self-aware. I yelled for my cattle-dog then sat, hyperventilating.

Gun-dogger was as confused as hell.

The inflection in his tilted head, brown eyes: “We’re running in nature, man, what’s the deal?” I explained I was having a human-all-too-human freak-out moment. I took me back down to some middle place of sanity.

I’ve since had a few similar experiences–but they’re fewer. My response to the panic was a self-check that probably kept me from losing all grounding. Lord knows I might have started some quack religion or written some damnable book about the rapture and the nature of all things. [As if the world needs some 30-year-old white-boy Chopra-Oprah mash-up.]

I know this goes against the pop-Buddhism that usurped North America’s homespun sack of proverbs, but I think our desires are too weak. Yes, desire does cause immense psychological pain and wrong action. It turns us into weapons of mass consumption.

But our desires are not bad; they are just disordered. I know my desire to be entirely lost in the fog was good–panic prompted the memory that “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep,” but the desire for beauty echoes with our desire for a “far better country.” This, in turn, gives us that mission–what high, holy barnacles called the visio beatifica–that makes the work of our hands far more meaningful.

We spend ours miring in booze and sex and chocolate–all good things. But these are penultimates: things that intimate a perfect and beatific vision of a perfect love.

YES, the visio beatifica suggests that what I felt–the lagoon, my late-great Queensland Heeler, the jogging–was an intimation of my soul’s home. The leaves of God, says Clive Staples Lewis “rustle with the rumor that it’s so.” If I’m wrong? Don’t think about that too much. It’s given me a greater drive to see that matter matters; it’s made me more mindful; it’s given this holy jack-ass an aim: I want to see the visio beatifica realized on earth.

Many say theology is a dead and solemn exploration in the hollow halls of sin-stained cathedrals built on slave-and-oil-money. Maybe so. But in a theophany–the fiery presence of the face of the All-Beautiful–the word “doctrine” doesn’t even ring-out-a-second thought, and thought itself is extinguished.

The burden of beauty

August 5, 2011

philosophy

7 Comments

RILKE puts it simply in his letters to a young poet:

Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

There was a long period in my life where I lived and thrived and dwelt and dealt in irony. But there was one catch, and that was Catch-22.

I was re-reading Catch-22 for the 22^nd time, and (for the first time) I shut it 1/2 the way through. I wasn’t laughing as much—and I was surprised by boredom.

In high school Catch-22 took me into a world of stirring arch-farce; during college, the novel remained a compass and a mainstay; in the years after, it haunted and delighted my memory. I’d smirk when I’d think of a line from Yossarian (“Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy”). Now it feels just as taut with acerbic wordplay and high-dark comedy…

…and I’m not laughing.

NOW, the endless train of circuitous idiot logic and brilliant nonsense is still there—but I’m not. I’ve had this issue for a while: I’ve stopped being as troubled by things that are out of my control (bureaucrats, the weather, Lybia, eternal souls, bacteria), and have been more aware of the extraordinary ordinary beauty of everything beyond the bad.

SOMETHING there is that hides behind beauty—it’s a burden to cleave to the beautiful. While Dawkins and Hitchens and Gould and the other misanthropes du jour are ranting about the cruelty or absence of God (or the gods) in brilliant and sexy and flatulated word-noises, I am given to focus on beauty. It was so easy and fun when I could simply deconstruct playfully: all the people making money by telling people to have less; the way prophets and priests pervert their message with their lives; vibrating five-fingers; the way we’re the only species that’s ashamed of our species…”42 42 42″ says l‘idiot magnifique who struts and frets his hour on the stage…and is heard no more.

HERE and now, when I’m steaming and heavy I tend to rest—to whistle in the dark. It’s a pain in the ass, really. I relax and watch the geometric intricacy in which a seed carapace pirouettes through the gravitational ether—it’s crap. It’s amazing. Everything can subside and be subsiding and dying and crusty and dreary, but then I keep having to running into something beautiful.

ABIDING in the beautiful dark is far more difficult than deconstructing the good.

A terrible beauty is born.

The mythic power of migration

August 3, 2011

alternative travel, mythology

11 Comments

In North America, there is a species of butterfly (Vanessa cardui) that is a flying mystery.

Elegant and mysterious in life; ingloriously splattered against a dashboard in death.

In 2001, there was a blizzard of painted ladies (also called cosmopolitans), and we felt guilty because of the butterfly carnage on the 405. This exodus baffled us. Every few years, I learned, the southland radiates with millions of butterflies.

The “paisley radiation” happened again in 2005, on gusts of Santa Ana air (around 100 cosmopolitan generations later). I remember surfing and seeing butterflies woven into the rainbow tails of spindrifts behind the waves.

Why does one generation (in hundreds) suddenly radiate north in what scholars call a “unidirectional flight with no return” (Ecology April, 1950)? The lifecycle is 2-3 weeks. Those who enjoy their adolescence in the bay area are five generations removed from the ladies who left the south.

Oh, scientists will say she’s just finding pasture when it becomes dry in the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico. Scientists will call it a “dispersal,” because an individual butterfly never returns. But the species is a being of individual beauties. This kind of paradox makes me high. The fuming, flying swarms of beauties are not like human beings. They are a swarming, swirling sum far more majestic than the number of individuals.

The explanation is all right and well, but I can’t stop believing that there’s this great Conductor that suddenly chimed something primal in one generation. The individual became part of a beautiful, swirling plague:::northward.

All die en route, or returning. It’s a grand orchestration of orange and brown and white on air in a dance of individuality in the conformity of groups (there is no non-conformity, nor any need in the life span or the wingspan of the butterfly)–guided like Kerouac or Kesey, by some internal compass, to the haunts of high California.

It’s not consistent. It’s not rational. Sometimes hundreds of generations of butterflies remain in the desert, until some generation acts on some holy unction to fly and die in some unseen, unknown world–to leave everything and to migrate to the high, cooler places.
–
There are no leaders or hipsters among the cosmopolitans: they are all conformists, and they live in conformity to a high and holy purpose…

…to make humans feel guilty for driving; to perplex scientists.

There is a primal impetus to “radiate” with a generation and a tribe. We don’t follow the seasons, the weather, or the flocks and their feed–but we have the same grit. The rise of “digital nomadism” speaks to our need to press the edges of our experience, and find the world completely renewed and changed. Populations that don’t migrate, stagnate and inbreed (see Swamp People or Jersey Shore).

Some will say “I’m locked in! I vacate every six months! I’m holed up in this mortgage, this house, this great thing that was supposed to bring me peace and ha-ha-happiness and stability–and I would never have to go anywhere again…but if I did there’d be wide roads and bike lanes and everything necessary for contentment. Oh, stale old world, with such ugly creatures….“ I say, listen to the ladies. This is the generation.

And here’s the secret: as for the ladies so it is for humankind. There is no stability. There are a few certainties; the rest is up to the impulses of the soul.

No need to go to Dharamshala (no need to see the highest lama…he’s on Twitter)–all we build, break, every decision and indecision–every small change–is this holy, harrying and horrifying “here I go!” Like the ladies. This is the mythic power of migration. You may never see home or Paris or the maturation of your 401K. And you’re content.

Listen again to the vanessa coundi: the sound is as loud as a wing whispering on air.

There is no need to non-conform
when the same three colors
can dance on air
and sail on a liquid sky.

Keep radiating.

–
Inspired by E Vandenboomen’s exceptional article on the melancholy and power of border crossing

Pushing social smut

August 2, 2011

expatriate

10 Comments

James Joyce define pornography as art gives us desire for a “tangible object.” All advertising, to Joyce, is pornography.

METHINKS it’s a high-holy day to reinvite this definition back to the read/write net.

Like pornography, most blogs push social influence. This makes the reader strive and toil and stress for an illusory tangibility.

To Joyce, pornography elicits fear and loathing because it is pedantic. It teaches us how to live, and is far less concerned with the radical “experience of being alive” (nods to Chase).

There are daily choices whether or not we’re going to push smut or offer art. We’ve all experienced the higher bloodbuzz of good art: a Dylan lyric, a riff from Buckley, a threnody from Drake, a sexy, gritty Plath poem, or a ululation through Coleman’s brass.

Everything else that pushes that keeps iterating “how-to” is a little pornish. Some of my most popular articles have been pornographic: I’ve sold supersaturated pictures of Latin American destinations and spoke half-honestly about the glory of the expat life. It probably left my readers feeling less than, hollow–a taut drum. I’ve never made much money, but I still felt dirty. I’ve cinched these in some way-back archive.

I’d take ebook du jour, and consider the premise, the intention and the message. Porn (to Joyce) = didactic (you should, must, need, ought to) get this desirable object (better life, sex, muscles, jeans, work schedule).

Internet marketing (to wit: traffikeering) violently yokes our imagination to the desired object. Concept replaces aesthetic experience.

I’m punchy, but I’m not an aesthetic pharisee. I think there is an art to lifestyle design–given the ethos is other-centered. Too much Joyce and you start to think that everything legible is porno.

En fin, in a recent parley with Andrew on social smut, I was reminded of a semiconscious dream:

I was in the fake-wicker basket on this giant blind man’s bike and was constantly surprised that I did not fall. I began to enjoy the scenery and to feel the wind-every obstacle became the opportunity for a new thrill. Suddenly I found the big was going in the direction best suited for me; and, while I did not have control, it was right, and the beauty of the flight obliterated all need for control.

When I’m writing and arting well, I’m that guy–on the front of some giant blind-man’s bike in the anteroom of truth, content with half-knowledge, and to pull down half-perfect words from the penetralium of what I find lovely, dark and deep, to invite others into this experience. T

PanAm histrionic

July 28, 2011

Uncategorized

2 Comments

My mom (right) and colleague Ginny in 747 engine

Before PanAm lands on the small screen and hijacks my tender digital identity, I thought it might high time to offer a bit of backstory:

I. My mom was a Pan Am flight attendant. The eldest of six kids from the navel of Nebraska, she was the only one to leave, and she did so on PanAm’s ticket. She applied in 1969, when the 747 was being instated, and was called to Chicago. She had a great first interview and was called back (2 hours later). She used those two hours to buy a new burgundy dress and matching heels from Saks 5th Avenue, brushed up on Spanish, and was soon 30,000 feet above Seoul serving cocktails to people like Pelé, Elizabeth Taylor, and ubiquitous drunk Austrailians.

II. My dad has eternal wanderlust. He’s 65, but is a constant traveler. He tried to sail around the world; he rode his motorcycle in Baja, where he was chased by banditos twice; he sold property in Telluride to pay for my birth. Bad move.

On Monday, he returned from Borneo and Jakarta, where he met with locals in the mudflats and gave seminars to Indonesian pastors about hydroponics and micro-farming. Last year he visited us on Fernando de Noronha island (“Brazil’s Galapagos”); he frequently travels to his buddy’s sun-baked, surf-soaked hideaway in Chacala, Mexico. Home is just a place for the intervals between adventures.

III. I lived 25 years in North America: San Diego, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. In the five years since, I’ve spent the most critical and vocationally formative years of my life in Colombia and Brazil as an international educator. This is my Pan(all)-American experience. It has nothing to do with the rockstar pilot and jet-setting multinational, cosmopolitan and the tiresome epicurean lifestyle of the global booboisie.

When my imagination transcends the confines of my first (immensely comfortable) 25 years, I find “a thousand thousand twanging instruments” that “delight and hurt not.” The American experience is incredible; it’s abundance and opportunity is once-in-a-millenia. But it is one way to live. And now, in the increasing connectedness, all-American will find peace in our post-Pangaea longing for synchronicity.

There is probably something in you–something that longs to see the geological and political reconciliation of your world. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”; good story–creative nonfiction–threads the transformative power of myth into the panam flight plans. This is what I do. I’m like my mom and dad (and histories of frontiers people before them). I’m just a little more chatty.

The mythic power of leaving home

July 26, 2011

Uncategorized

5 Comments

On Saturday, July 30th, we return to Latin America for the fifth time. Brasília, Brazil: a city designed by artists, communists, and samba-dancing politicians.

The original plane-shaped city-plan, by urban designer Lucio Costa looked more like a chinese character than a mark-up. It is, for all intents and purposes, Martian. I often go back to Seu Jorge’s EP for The Life Aquatic (including the serendipitously titled “Life on Mars”). All songs are covers and samba-fueled revisions of David Bowie classics.

So we go back to Mars on Friday. I feel a soft breath of panic when I think about driving to the Draconian LAX tarmac, the lines, the traffic at the airport. Miami and American Airlines (!).

I feel sense of eternal excitement at another year of deliberate and interesting and unknown trips and possibly Lisbon or Bariloche or another extended stint in Buenos Aires–or the deepest south, to jive and grok with Penguins and Puffins.

Leaving is painful, but nostalgia is a perversion of the memory. Some mindful, pleasant reflection on the past is good; too much time in the “facebook-of-our-soul” is paralyzing. — Here’s the thing about living beyond the cul-de-sac: we often are homesick, but we realize that there is no home that satisfies that Hestia, hearth-side, Christmas-time, Norman Rockwell ideal. The dad with a pipe, according to Mad Men (a show I’ve grown to love and hate) sells cigarettes and navigates affairs.

Leaving home takes us into what Crystal Street calls “The Third Place.” An easeful sense of ease in homelessness. It’s finding one’s home sky-gazing, being at rest when the soul-aches for something else. Every departure, we find, is an entrance to a more abundant life.

Decluttering of the mind and soul and body (like objects), is leaving the cul-de-sac. The end of the American dream is a nightmare of loneliness. The Nightmare-of-loneliness is a dark-night-of-the-soul. When we are comfortable in the dark-night-of-the-soul there is little the world can do to scare us. Not even an Orwellian Martian city. When you can be there you can float out of the constructs of any local place, any toxic tribe, any thing that keeps us hinged to a too comfortable home.

Every depression, every time the old is gone, every death, every good-bye-to-the-old life is a kind of “leaving.” “Taking leave.” “BoHo HoBo.” “Tchau e bon-dia.” I look forward to returning to Mars. There is life on Mars because there are no cul-de-sacs; I’ll miss you San Diego (stay classy), but our “our good old days” include “distilled memories.”

The song (“Life on Mars”) ends like this:
Se näo eu vou perder quem sou/If not I’ll lose who I am
Vou querer me mudar/I’m going to want to move
Para uma Life on Mars/To a Life on Mars

—

The mythic power of discipline