Good Life Good Death

(from the archives, Dec 2001)

for christmas, my brother deet bought a book called 'good life, good death'. it was written by the 13th nephew of the dalai lama. he discussed a bit of it with us last night. i realized that my conversational skills have declined. i don't use them at all - i just write lowercase online. nevertheless i was able to witness the transfixing effect of these eastern mysteries upon him.

i chimed in clumsily about karen armstrong's biography of bhudda which i am 3/4 finished. the pearls of wisdom burbled out of my mouth in a slurry. one of the kids yelled, or dropped punch on the carpet and the moment was lost.

i tried to recapture the moment by starting the conjecture that we are engaged in a clash of civilizations. how could islam beat the west? the answer had something to do with 'they don't value individual life like we do'. david got us started talking about our military policy of saving every man, and the powell doctrine, as he recounted a friend of his ability to swim 21 miles in the open ocean with combat boots on. it went on for a decent while.

black wedenesday hasn't happened yet. so i wonder what i'll be able to say before people care to prove that america is actually always and everywhere acutely aware of any eventuality. our problem is broadcasting and capturing the attention of people whose values we will change in the moment of need.

the buddha says that pain is unavoidable. this is also revealed in my 15 year old diary. facing pain is a universal challenge. as i embark to make myself an appropriate middle-aged middle-class existence i find this appealing. i always sought to avoid the fate of characters in martin amis' fiction. but now i am finding it in my heart to wear a jolly give a shit attitude and integrate it into my daily smile. i am almost ready to think of america as my very own little ghetto. avoiding pain is avoiding life. it is the attempt to think your way out of every problem, it is the attempt to institutionalize civilizing forces. it is the attempt to extend life. but the buddhais convincing me that life is in the moment and institutions are all vanity.

there is no such thing as patriotism. that's why nobody agrees on what it is. patriotism is affinity to the state, and the state is an institution, a momumental edifice of artifice, a construction of theories and anonymous fidelities. it isn't what it was 20 minutes ago - it lies in the attitude of a million people trying to say what it means to them. the constitution is artifice as well, a representation of a dynamic spirit of love and respect which loses all energy once abstracted to paper. the man who drunk wine at jefferson's table might have an idea what this thing was all about, but unless you are he reincarnated, you will not know. it won't be your story, and in the end that's all you remember. you remember the man who pulled you from the burning building and the pieces of your leg hanging from the extruded aluminum spur. you pledge your life to the one who saved yours. that is because pain is universal and freedom from pain is universal and the only act of civilization is life-saving. not patriotism. not the abstract. wittgenstien fucked us all over when he said that words are deeds, and even he knew that he was full of shit, because he had to pick up the poker at the moral science club...

i like this wooly little forum. but we too are vain. in my new neighborhood, i'm going to teach my neighbors how to chop wood. a deeds exchange will be more useful than a words exchange. that's why going to church is meaningless except for the music. you cannot just sit and recieve wisdom or blessings. you have to be blowing air through your body and heaving it out. you have to be exercising your fingers and feet and pulling out all the stops and bobbing your head and feeling the resonsances of the low notes. making music is a deed. (last night at the party, my job was to keep the music playing and the fire burning). hosting is work but also a pleasure - it is better to be the party giver than to be the fetted friend. the moment is found in alleviating the suffering of my guests. the conversation about religion and politics was dead but people actually danced.

you have to find your own way. words are only useful inside your head. you only write them down to remember. but now every word you ever wrote is trying to own your spirit, but that was 15 years ago. google doensn't know shit. google is just like nbc, cbs, pbs all of them. it's just trying to make real a surplus of meaningless abstracts. it's trying to force its context on you. it is a haunted house jam packed with a surfeit of restless spirits trying to inhabit your body. it doesn't matter that it was 'you' that wrote it - those were 15 billion wholly other cells, not you. you are now, and the more time you try to convince yourself that you are the same you were before, the more words you need. go right ahead, try it. make a word harness. if you're crafty maybe it'll fit and lead you in some direction. but you'll go wrong because the use of words is for them to be observant not reflective. there is a reason time moves forward and not backward. you cannot be institutionalized without words. all that effort to maintain a static fiction, all those applications, all of those entry level skills, all of those poor saps trying to conform to the ways and means of old spirits, old documentation, old manuals with none of the inventor's spark. get you head rid of the ghosts of christmas past and be more mindful of the present. you'll have to find your own way. tradition is a trap.

the job for computers is to keep bartleby free. every institution needs a million bartlebys. i struggle to take his scrivening spirit and bottle it in silicon. then he can be free of it and live in the moment. once the building is empty of humans, all laid off and the principals gone to brazil, let it crash to the ground. who cares?