New Compositions on My Music Site.

I titled these pieces "Dittie" because they are far simpler (and shorter) than most the music I compose. I like writing for string quartets and orchestras - large scale pieces that may take 6 months or even several years to finish. Here I'm trying to capture my brother's moods as a child. 




Paul, my younger brother by three years and two months, was enormously bright, but my parents, already concerned about my "bookish" tendencies, decided they wanted Paul to be "more a normal boy" than me.  I think they came to regret this later, when unequipped by the skills gained in study to understand himself or to cope with the loneliness that comes with difference, with brilliance, he became enormously self destructive. Rural America is a hellish environment, unaccepting of difference, of change, of any motivation wider than narrow self-interest. No wonder that it is a home today to both endemic racism and Trumpism. I escaped by leaving public school several years early, going off to Toronto to study at a conservatory. My brother remained.                 

He died just a few weeks after his 18th birthday, when his already long struggle with alcohol and drugs culminated in a single car accident on a lonely country road. His best friend was in the car, and walked away with minor injuries. Paul died five days later of internal injuries, spending those last days a total quadriplegic, unable to move a muscle from neck downward.

The images I hope are conveyed in the music are not of Paul's suffering, nor his troubles with booze, drugs or violence, but of Paul as he was going off to kindergarten - a proud march here, a silly song there. Listen and please enjoy.

Peter Kropotkin - History for the 99%

History for the 99%   

Seeing Neighbours Falling Into Poverty Pisses Me Off.

Peter Kropotkin 

Loving readers: If you read only a little of this, go to the end and read a few paragraphs from Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, the most unlikely of revolutionaries was born this day in 1842. Why so unlikely? Born to a Russian noble family, he bore the title ‘Prince.’ As a child he served as a page in the Court of Alexander II, Tsar of all Russia. He attended the most prestigious of schools until taking a commission with a Cossack Regiment serving in the East.  He had an encyclopaedic mind, publishing important papers in the fields of geography, geology, and biology. But above all, he was a man of finely attuned conscience, who saw Russian society as it was, violent, oppressive, wherein a tiny brutal minority held the vast majority as slaves. It was this clarity of vision and conscience that brought him to confront the horrors of his time, when, like now, avarice, and unbridled ambition lives vampirically on the vast sufferings of others.

While Kropotkin’s scientific endeavours continued throughout his life, his political interests began early in life. For all his immense privilege, he was aware almost instinctively of its source, the suffering of the slaves that the Russians called ‘раб’ or in English, serfs. But being a man of science and philosophy he did more than note this and react in repulsion. He tried to understand it. What were the roots of such a brutal state of affairs?apparently What sustains the fiction that a man may own a man, a woman, a child?

His older brother Alexander, who was later to kill himself while exiled to Siberia, was arrested as a university student by the Tsar’s secret police. His crime was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance. Only when the professor who had lent him the book stepped forward was he released without apology. The penchant for subversive reading was apparently a family affair, for soon young Peter was reading Proudhon and Bakunin, along with other luminaries of the socialist movement, a movement that had frightened Europe’s hereditary rulers into savage suppression during the year of revolutions that sprang up city by city in 1848.

In 1862 Peter joined the military, one of the expected routes of advancement for a young man of his status. As a junior officer with a Cossack regiment, he explored portions of Siberia, and explored the state of penal settlement they came across..  In 1871, after writing several well  received scientific papers on the geology and geography of Siberia, he returned west where he rejected an offered scientific post in favour of political organising. In 1872 he joined the Chaikovskii Circle, a secret group of socialists that attempted to organise among the peasantry and illicitly published books and pamphlets by Marx,  John Stuart Mill, and Darwin. He began writing, too often perhaps under his own name, for he was arrested for the first of many times in 1874.  He was imprisoned in the imposing fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg. As is fitting of a prison built with the unpaid labour of slaves, the fortress erected by Peter styled ‘the Great,” could not hold Peter. By bribery or deceit he escaped and fled across Europe to Switzerland.  His brother Alexander was arrested the same year, and on charges of ‘political untrustworthiness’  was, accompanied with his wife and children, exiled to Siberia, where he would die.

Peter Kropotkin’s politics did naught to make his Swiss hosts comfortable, and at their suggestion in 1881, he moved to France. There he formally joined the First International as the International Working Men's Association came to be known known. The First International was an early federation of socialist leaning political parties, some radical and seeking an immediate overthrow of Capitalism - as for example Marx and Engels, but many more moderate. Peter Kropotkin was of the latter temperament, and not by temperament alone. He had earlier written back in 1869:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.
Peter Kropotkin was none of these things. Firm in his beliefs and thoughts, but gentle of disposition, he believed that humanity could be swayed towards a principled anarchism through persuasion and example. Others, especially those in power were not inclined to notice the distinction of revolutionist and gradualists.  He was arrested again, this time by the French Secret Police as a member of an illegal organisation. After the fall of the Paris Communion in 1848, membership in the First International was illegal. He was sentenced to five years.

Remarkably, his first writings on anarchism were smuggled from prison and published. After three years, Kropotkin was released and left France for the more tolerant Britain. Here he was received and became friends withWilliam Morris and George Bernard Shaw.  His political writing intensified, as did his organising, both locally and by letters to France and Russia. It was in Britain that he was to found the journal Freedom, still published today (and read by the author). It was also in England that he published a series of remarkable books, like the brilliant Conquest of Bread that Emile Zola called a true poem.

He visited both Canada and the United States, where his fame as an anarchist philosopher preceded him. In New York he spoke about the dangers of state capitalism (that underlies Marx ands Engels revolutionary program).

In New Jersey he was asked for a statement on his political beliefs. He said,

I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which I believe will be communistic in economics, but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption.... The social democrats are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre - the State and work toward the circumference, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex.

Back in Britain, books poured from the man: his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1901), Mutual Aid (1902) and The Great French Revolution (1909). To this add literally hundreds of journal articles, newspaper pieces and the immense work of editing not one, but several journals.

Peter Kropotkin returned to Russia during the revolution of 1918, hoping for anarchism to develop. Despite efforts in this direction, Lenin’s party seized power.  To Lenin he wrote: Russia was a Soviet Republic only in name and at present it is not the soviets which rule in Russia but party committees.

In Russia he completed his final book, Ethics, Origin and Development (1922).

Peter Kropotkin died of pneumonia in the small city of Dmitrov, 45 miles north of Moscow on
8 February, 1921. It had been a hard winter and there’d been food shortages.  In spite of obvious secret police presence, for Lenin was nothing if not nervous of anarchists, his funeral was attended by thousands. As word spread of his death, tens of thousands mourned. Peter Kropotkin loved humanity, and he loved people. Arrested, imprisoned, he had never betrayed a compatriot. He have his whole life to the belief that violence does not rule us, only enslave us. Slavery, said Kropotkin, will never endure.


Here’s a brief excerpt from Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread:

“The shriek of the engine is heard in the wild gorges of the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. The rivers have been made navigable; the coasts, carefully surveyed, are easy of access; artificial harbours, laboriously dug out and protected against the fury of the sea, afford shelter to the ships. Deep shafts have been sunk in the rocks; labyrinths of underground galleries have been dug out where coal may be raised or minerals extracted. At the crossings of the highways great cities have sprung up, and within their borders all the treasures of industry, science, and art have been accumulated.

Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people's sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one above another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of public buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the civilization of the town, its industry, its special characteristics, have slowly grown and ripened through the co-operation of generations of its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even to-day, the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe. Each of the atoms composing what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its value to the fact that it is a part of the great whole.”


Great thanks to John Simkin whose research and writing supplied much of the above material.

Children of Light, But With Limits

We are literally all the children of light. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all matter in the universe came into existence a small fraction of  second into the Big Bang a bit more than 13.7 billion years ago. That’s right, the components of every atom in your body, and indeed the atoms themselves came into existence In the Big Bang.  In the first moments of this event, the Bang that produced our universe,  huge amounts of high energy photons, that is to say, light came into existence. The collision of these photons produced all the protons, neutrons and electrons that exist today, including the atomic particles that comprise you and me.

This isn’t theory, but a fact that has been reproduced at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), at their high energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, and other high energy particle accelerators around the world.  Of course, it’s not all good news. The other name for the light composed of such high energy photons is gamma radiation, a form of light that is inimical to life. It’s just another of the wry gestures intrinsic to the universe after the Big Bang. Of course, people, especially those of a fundamentalist disposition, often ask “What was here before the Big Bang?” Expecting that the answer will be their notion of the author of the Bang, but such speculations are nonsensical, as time itself came into being in the Big Bang. There is no “before,” only after. But we are wired to seek causality, and as such, this answer is deeply dissatisfying, regardless of its truth.

Without knowing it, people asking that are posing a question that runs directly into Zeno’s paradox: Zeno, a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago put it something like this.

Achilles [The great athlete mentioned by Homer in the Iliad as having been at the siege of Troy] races a tortoise, and as a generous hero type gives the tortoise a ten metre head start for their 100 metre race. As the race starts, the tortoise hurries along at 1/10th of a metre per second, while Achilles, not wanting the poor tortoise to be embarrassed, moves off at a stately 1 meter per second. Five seconds later Achilles reaches the halfway point to the tortoise’s starting position, but it is no longer halfway to the tortoise. As slow as he is, the tortoise has moved on. Achilles reaches the new halfway point, but again the tortoise has moved on, repeat ad nauseam. At some point poor Achilles must have realised that there are an infinite series of halfway points, thrown down his laurel ring sun shade and gone off for a nice bottle of Corcyraean Asyrtiko.

Mathematically, it actually makes sense that Achilles must reach each of an ever changing series of half way points. It’s a question whose logic is such as to have  an intrinsic appeal, even though we understand intuitively that this is not the way things work in the real world. So too, when we ask about events “before” the Big Bang we are asking a question that seems legitimate on its face, and by the standards of rhetorical logic can be asked, but which modern physics demonstrates is illegitimate.

We, as beings in time, cannot imagine timelessness, and thanks to the form of our evolved brain, and the limits of our sensory abilities can neither directly  perceive or understand. It’s not that we don’t try.  We speak of moments or events that are “timeless. The religious sometimes claim that their ecstatic experiences take them to an unmediated otherness “beyond time.” For all our poetic utterances of time flowing as a river,  when we make such  claims we speak metaphorically. Our perception of time may change, occasionally seeming to slow as our attention s either focussed or lost, but time exists whether we perceive it or not. It is an empirical phenomenon tied to the physical nature of space and the mass of stellar objects..

The difference between our perceptions and remembrances of time and time’s reality points to flaws in our ability to perceive and process the nature of the universe’s reality. We think and remember in moments, frozen images of events, or at best brief “film strip” like remembrances, while time is unforgivingly a continuum, whose expression is not tied to our interests, but to relations of the physics mass and distance we are incapable of directly perceiving or capturing as memories.

What is genuinely remarkable is that some of us can, through the language of mathematics understand the structure of time, in spite of the handicaps of the mammalian brain as evolved as Homo sapiens. But the physicist remembers the everyday experiences of time, not as it is or as she or he understands it, but just like the rest of us, as captured by memory and all the limitations that implies. Children of light we may well be, but we are neither gods nor, divorced from our animality, but creatures evolved to see and understand the universe as is needful. We evolved to see threat and opportunity in our environment, with a memory meant to capture patterns of threat and opportunity. We are built with the ability to form memories that represent time more as flash cards than films, and without the sensory capacity to directly perceive time in its physical reality.

D.H.H.


A Small Addendum on CERN.

The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire is a European collaboration begun almost immediately after World War II ended. It was a response to the terrible bright nuclear flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where two bombs developed by the immense Anglo-American* Manhattan Project together killed or severely wounded more than 225,000 human lives, overwhelmingly civilians. CERN's avowed purpose was to increase the knowledge of physics for peace, a promise that has been kept in programs like the Large Hadron Collider, where immense energies are used to further humanity's understanding of the Cosmos.

A cutaway showing the packed magnets surrounding the slender red and clear tube where particles are accelerated.
Courtesy of CERN © 2014

The magnet structure in the photo -- the metal plates stacked horizontally in a U shape around the reddish central tube -- functions best at low superconductor temperatures of 455.8 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), just under 4 degrees above absolute zero. At absolute zero the vibrations of atoms we understand as heat are at their theoretical minimum.

This incredibly cold temperature has to be maintained along the entire 17 mile length of the collider’s precisely circular track, enabling the magnets to carry up to a 12,000 ampere current. To put this in perspective, a typical home electrical circuit is rates at 10 or 15 amperes. At 10 amperes, it would take 1200 home circuits to feed the collider's magnetic field without "blowing the breakers." All this power produces a field capable of constraining and directing particles with a momentum of up to 14 TeV (trillion electronvolts), or 14,000,000,000,000 electronvolts. Including the energy required for cooling, instrumentation, computers, et alia, the CERN facility's power requirements are more than 200 megawatts, or roughly the same as that of the neighbouring city of Geneva.

A significant portion of this power bill is to supply CERN's computers. Every year for the last several, various projects at CERN have produced a combined total of more the 14 Petabytes of raw data. Even at a time when new personal computers often have a storage capacity of a terabyte or two, this is a remarkable volume of data. My somewhat complicated studio set up is still unusual for having 14 terabytes of internal and external storage, which at the moment is about 65% used. A Petabyte is 1015 bytes or 1000 terabytes, so this number looks like 14,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Another way of thinking it is that they annually produce raw data 975 times that of accumulated works in the entire Library of Congress.  Now you know why CERN scientists (not a certain former Vice President) invented the internet. It was to share and shed data.


___________________

*British participation in the Manhattan Project is often forgotten or underestimated. British scientists, mathematicians  and engineers working both in the U.K. and the U.S. provided vital expertise to the project, though the U.S. provided virtually all the funding, and retained exclusive control over the weapons developed during the war. Fractious post-war politics initially undermined this cooperation, with the U.S. reneging on promises to share data and technology. Some information sharing was eventually restored, but only after it became clear that the U.K's native nuclear weapons endeavour was moving forward regardless of U.S. desires otherwise, and could be traded as part payment for American airforce basing rights on what American's sometimes referred to as the "aircraft carrier U.S.S. Britain."

An Eagle Flies

An Eagle Flies a Distant Sky
Crystal eyes, aetheric nerves

From distant skies look down.

Robot claws release their grip.

Fires of hell begin their fall.

Beneath, an edenic plain.

Two children, sisters play

With a doll blue eyed and blonde


Passing between small dark hands.

 

Bright smiles, laughter break under


Dark eyes. Joy and leaping

Steps as a new game begins.

The doll's pulled two ways at once,

Breaks and its wound bring silence,

Small recriminations.

But huddl’d beneath the sun

They splint and bandage its arm.

 

Becoming nurse and doctor

Another game is born.

The shade of the courtyard wall

is now a hospital ward.  

Faster yet hell’s fire bores down

From wings they never see.

Bursting through the courtyard wall

A pyre engulfs brick and stone.

 

Smoke and dust carry the flame

That melts the broken doll
,

lighting the sisters afire,

Burning flesh to char the bones.

Dead splattered meat draws the flies.

Games, dreams, and hopes are gone

Still above the eagle soars,

Crystal eyes never weeping.

 

Aether hides the assassins.

It’s us they claim to serve.

But where lies the loyalty

To life, to joy and laughter?
Where lays the true loyalty?
Is it to human life?
Have we forgotten what once
we lov'd and held so dearly?

Life, liberty and freedom
are not divisible.
True liberty and freedom
can not be bought with murder.

 

For all the victims of assassination, the killed, the wounded and their families, friends and neighbours:

 

This nation once opposed assassination on principle. It is our to our enduring shame that fear and indifference permits those we elect to continue in this morally reprehensible calculus of murder. 

Executive Order 11905 signed in 1976, by Gerald R. Ford formally banned political assassination while "improving" oversight on American Intelligence agencies, stating No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.
This order was strengthened by Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 in 1978 which states No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Executive order 12333 signed by Ronald Reagan reverted to a language closer to Ford's order; No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Today, assassinations have become a routine instrument of national policy. So long as the proposed target is named as a terrorist, the American president can, on his signature alone, authorise a drone strike anywhere in the world except American territory. The level of acceptable "collateral  damage," other people killed or injured in the strike is likewise set according to standards set by the president alone.

Recently border security forces have been authorised to use drones. Though it is claimed they are unarmed, they are reputedly of the same type used to carry weapons overseas.

Total civilians killed are estimated at between between 380 to 801.  The moral damage done to our nation and to democracy has been incalculably high. 57 drone strikes are known to have occurred under the authority of George W. Bush in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen alone.

During Obama’s two terms, 563 known drone strikes are know to have occurred in the same countries.
In Afghanistan during the Obama administration, more than a thousand strikes took place in 2016 alone. Those documented above do not include the far larger number of declared military drone strikes in that benighted nation, nor in Iraq, or Syria, the Sudan or Libya.
Constitutionally, the only way to effectively end this world wide campaign of terror is for the American Congress to ban political assassination in its entirety, and to provide for effective oversight armed drones, banning their use either entirely or at the minimum in declared wars. Armed drones, if they must exist, should be operated only by the military, not by so-called intelligence agencies, which have time and again proven unreliable when granted unsupervised power.
Here's the source for drone use data.

 

The Death of Buddha

Today, across Japan, The Americas and Europe many temples will ceremonially display large images like this one in memory of the death of sage of the Shakyas, Siddhārtha Gautama, the man most of us know by the title Buddha, which means "Awakened One."*  He was 80 years old when he died. If you click on the image to expand it, you'll see images of life - plants blooming out of season, animals bearing gifts of flowers, Buddhist monastics and saints bearing bowls filled with lotus blooms --symbols of eternity --and  look on with equanimity, while bodhisattva's, kings, queens, Japanese demigods, and even heaven itself with gods all are weeping.

15th Century Japanese painting on silk The Death of Buddha
(74 x 43 5/16 in.)  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in his death, Zen Buddhists celebrate and remember him not as a god, not as a being touched by some mysterious divinity or sainthood, but as a man who reached through the complexities of self -- memory, desire and fear -- to find a way forward out of the irreality we construct and construe as truth. This is actually how Buddhists traditionally call their practice: "The Way."

Siddhārtha Gautama was born a son of the ruling class of the Shakyas, a people living in the North East of the Indian Subcontinent in the 5th century B.C.E.. After a pampered and protected early life, he confronted the sorrows of his world at age 29. He then gave up his princely title to pursue wisdom rather than power. After a six year trek through the competing mystical and ascetic practices of the Vedic world, which then as today saw many spiritual teachers rise and fall, he found an alternative, what Buddhist's call "the middle way," that neither rejects life and experience, nor indulges transient pleasures and fears in an attempt to flee from suffering. This way is called the Eightfold Path:

1. Right seeing  - viewing as things are rather than as we wish them to be.
   
   
2. Right thought - understanding freed of the passions, desires and possessiveness that influences everyday thinking,
   
   
3. Right speech- communication freed from self-deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity)
   
   
4. Right activity - action freed from self deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity) which mean not only not killing, avoiding self indulgence, and sexual misconduct, but the just relations with the world around us: action as compassion and generosity.
   
   
5. Right livelihood - ways of living in the world that are not founded on increased distortions of reality, deception and theft of either goods or life.
   
   
6. Right effort - When we perceive clearly, think completely, talk, act and live in a way that recognises the world (and ourselves) for what it is, rather than what we desire or fear it to be, we are ready to make a leap, not of faith as Kierkegaard, the Christian theologian taught, but of our own effort and will to stay with the real, rather than within the piteous graspings born of desire or fear.
   
   
7. Right mindfulness - making the leap, having the will to stay in the world as it is, rather than the falsity of our own passion, needs, wants, and foolishness is to sense the world and our selves as it is - and having grasped this this, to remain there is right mindfulness, the way of awakening to real freedom.
   
   
8. Right practice - the methods, that strand of Buddhist teaching called Zen says are the surest path to genuine freedom from our passions, aggression, and foolishness or stupidity is through the practice of zazen and a cluster of related disciplines like koan study, and that these are not just tools to get to some other place or understanding, but are themselves liberation. 

Awakening or enlightenment doesn't remove us from the world. Like Siddhārtha Gautama, when we experience awakening we will continue to live, and will someday die. But in life and death alike we know the world and our lives with a beautiful and terrible clarity, that brings with it genuine benevolence, care, and love.

There are Zen monasteries, communities and sitting groups across North America, and I'd encourage all my readers to find and join one. There are, regrettably, a number of "fake" teachers, especially on the internet. If you're looking for a group or teacher and are unsure of how to distinguish the real from the fake, feel free to email or comment here, and I'll try to be of help.

You can find a series of brief lectures on the Eightfold Path here, given by Anzan Hoshin Roshi of the White Wind Zen Community in Canada.
___________

* Japan, whose Zen practice laid the groundwork for much of the growth of Buddhism in North America and Europe adopted the Western calendar in the late 19th Century, fixing religious and secular remembrances to dates in a 365 day calendar. Much of the rest of Buddhism ties these dates to a lunar calendar, so the date seems to wander in the eyes of the West.

Jefferson and America's Lost Liberties

Portrait of Jefferson by  

Charles Wilson Peale, 1791

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison,  30 January 1787

For all his failings, not least his slave holding and his views of the First Nations peoples whose lands he coveted for the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was nonetheless the architect of America's now lost conception of liberty. Deeply formed by both the philosophers of an earlier generation called Humanists, and even more by his European philosophical contemporaries, the early advocates of the Enlightenment, Jefferson taught without hesitation that the rights of humankind to liberty, to strive for happiness, to speak freely without fear of reprisal, to believe or not believe in divinity, and to equal justice before the law are all apparent as the natural product of reason. He taught that the moral obligation of a fearless conscience is the defence of these rights. The famous quote that appears above is part of a larger argument, that it is the nature of government to seek power, to gather power and to exert power at the expense of natural human liberty. 

Rebellions, said Jefferson, are the people’s way of putting governments in their place as servants to the people, not their masters. In the generations since the Second World War we have seen rebellions in America: both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement were precisely the kinds of correctives Jefferson envisioned. But at the same time and since, aided by changes in technology and communications, as well as a spirit of fear fostered by our government -- first the 1950’s Red Scares, secondly the fear of annihilation that pervaded the Cold War with the USSR, and today, the government’s drumbeat of fear and economic loss that blend the image of terror with the faces of ethnic and religious difference.

American government has become a tyranny all but unrestrained by the freedoms Jefferson saw as unalienable rights, our rights to free speech, to unfettered communication and thought, to travel where and how we please, to champion the causes that appeal to our hearts, and to command equal protection under the law, all have been scoured away by technologies of surveillance, by legal acts that deprive of an unfettered right to habeas corpus, that permit secret courts, secret warrants and secret trials, even secret detention and torture, all in the name of “Homeland Security.” 

Never has tyranny had a better friend than the tiny minorities of religious fanatics, both Muslim and Christian that have engaged in acts of terror, save one, those who have taken advantage of terror to establish their own power by trampling ours. Today we suffer under an administration that trades on fear, that asks us to hate that we might fear all the more. What should our response to such tyrants be? I know the answer Jefferson offered. I’m not sure that Americans have the stomach for liberty today. I know what Jefferson the revolutionary taught, but it’s so much easier to live behind walls of hate, to trade the depth of conscience liberty demands for these superficial protections from our fears. 

DHH

Here is the complete text of Jefferson’s letter, written 232 years ago:

Dear Sir,

My last to you was of the 16th of December; since which, I have received yours of November 25 and December 4, which afforded me, as your letters always do, a treat on matters public, individual, and economical. I am impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states. So far as I have yet seen, they do not appear to threaten serious consequences. Those states have suffered by the stoppage of the channels of their commerce, which have not yet found other issues. This must render money scarce and make the people uneasy. This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable; but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments. A consciousness of those in power that their administration of the public affairs has been honest may, perhaps, produce too great a degree of indignation; and those characters, wherein fear predominates over hope, may apprehend too much from these instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth or experience. Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.  [loosely Better the evils of liberty than the quiescence of servitude -- Jefferson is quoting from Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 - ed.]. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. If these transactions give me no uneasiness, I feel very differently at another piece of intelligence, to wit, the possibility that the navigation of the Mississippi may be abandoned to Spain. I never had any interest westward of the Allegheny; and I will never have any. But I have had great opportunities of knowing the character of the people who inhabit that country; and I will venture to say that the act which abandons the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation between the Eastern and Western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the territory of the United States; an abandonment of the fairest subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining those debts on our own necks, in perpetuum. I have the utmost confidence in the honest intentions of those who concur in this measure; but I lament their want of acquaintance with the character and physical advantages of the people, who, right or wrong, will suppose their interests sacrificed on this occasion to the contrary interests of that part of the confederacy in possession of present power. If they declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or as soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers and sons, or rather, to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide. Nor would that country quit the cost of being retained against the will of its inhabitants, could it be done. But it cannot be done. They are able already to rescue the navigation of the Mississippi out of the hands of Spain, and to add New Orleans to their own territory. They will be joined by the inhabitants of Louisiana. This will bring on a war between them and Spain; and that will produce the question with us, whether it will not be worth our while to become parties with them in the war in order to reunite them with us and thus correct our error. And were I to permit my forebodings to go one step further, I should predict that the inhabitants of the United States would force their rulers to take the affirmative of that question. I wish I may be mistaken in all these opinions.

Yours affectionately, Th. Jefferson

Line 411ƒ

For Francis Bacon  &  George Dyer 


How turns the key
That turns but once,
That's heard but once?
Does it lock or free?

What sensible nonsense! 

What freedom whilst memory persists?

Whilst indictments stand?

When remembrance convicts?

The key heard by the living

justly locks, and can only lock
Till the cells of memory give up,
Discharging these small potentials.

There is no otherwise, no other way.
The key once turned is the door locked,
Always locked, till the death of memory
enacts the voiding absolution on the lost. 

  

Francis Bacon's studio reconstituted at the City Gallery - The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland.
Photo by Antoine Moreau - Copyleft

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Eihei Dōgen

Today is the birthday of Eihei Dōgen (永平道元) (January 19, 1200 - September 26, 1253) 

Roshi Dōgen* was a controversial and highly influential Buddhist teacher, philosopher, and the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, a school that is also one of the m0st widely practiced forms of Zen in America.

As a young monk he grew dissatisfied with the ritualism and academic forms of Buddhism then prevalent in Japan. He went to China seeking a new teacher, ultimately returning to Japan in 1228 where he founded a new form of Buddhist praxis that emphasised meditation not as a vehicle leading to enlightenment, but rather that meditation is itself enlightenment.

This radical teaching garnered both rapid growth for this new school, as well as violent opposition from other Buddhists, schools that enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the harsh feudal political structures of 13th Century Japanese society. Dōgen was the author of a number of influential texts, books that are as fresh and effective today as when they were written. Here's a passage from one of two books he wrote titled titled Shōbōgenzō -  or in English, True Dharma Eye Treasury, a compilation of some 300 brief Zen teachings called Koans. The title itself was considered provocative, because it implies that the Buddha's teaching (the Dharma) are not bound to the tradition's Sutra's - formal teachings, many of which are attributed to the Buddha himself, but instead can be experienced in these jewel-like koans.  Among the central teachings of Zen is sudden enlightenment, that it is not easily realised through the study of the sutras, but more often directly in meditation or even from mind to mind through interactions with a Roshi, or even a monastery cook (as happened to Dōgen in China). The translation is by Kazuaki Tanahashi.

________

Zhaozhou asked Nanquan, “What is the Way?”
Nanquan said, “Ordinary mind is the Way.

Zhaozhou said, “Shall I try to direct myself toward it?” 
Nanquan said, “If you try to direct yourself toward it, you will move away from it.”

Zhaozhou said, “If I don’t try, how will I know it’s the Way?” 
Nanquan said, “The Way is not concerned with knowing or not knowing.  Knowing is illusion; not knowing is blank consciousness. If you truly arrive at the Great Way of no trying, it will be like great emptiness, vast and clear. How can we speak of it in terms of affirming or negating?”

Zhaozhou immediately realized the profound teaching.**

________

The themes  of this koan are familiar to any student of Buddhism: the Way of the Buddha, the role of the mind in entering or barring the Way, the realisation that enlightenment cannot be learned, but is always present, always available, pervading every experience, perception and thought, yet hidden by the deceptive nature of experience, perception and thought. The way of the Buddha is not the achievement of supernatural beings or even extraordinary efforts, but instead is known when we both embrace and release the ordinary, or everyday mind.

____________
____________

*     Roshi is an honorific meaning teacher, and its use indicates that Dōgen received the
       Inka from his Roshi, testifying to his enlightenment and strength as a teacher, and
       becoming part of an unbroken line of succession, tracing back to the Buddhist patriarchs
       who established Buddhism after the death of Gautama, the historical Buddha.

** the term "realized" here means more than intellectual understanding. Rather, it implies
     that Zhaozhou was, at some level, transformed or enlightened by this teaching.

And

And

A sound slips the tongue
Forward closing the open palate
To a stuttered stop that opens again.

And

Dividing while appearing to join

Life and death

Wisdom and madness

History and fable

Past and present

Yesterday and tomorrow

Simple and complex

Empty and full.

And
Conjunction yet division
Innocence and guilt
The emptiness of plenty
Famine and surfeit
Hunger and satisfaction
Faith and silence
Cries and shouts.

And
Chants echo forgotten meaning
Plain words and lost intentions
Inculcation and form
Open and formless.

Yes and No.

Where We Stand.

The Republicans in Congress have joined in Trump's cry against democracy itself. We don't need the press - we've got Fox to tell us what to believe. We don't need equality under the law -- what the point of being rich if you can't bully your way around? You don't need to vote --we'll make you spend hours in line, challenge your vote and call you a fraud. The one thing the Republican Party and their lap-dogs fears above all is working people finally seeing past the lies, the spin, the outright propaganda they twist in place of honest facts.  The second thing they fear is that we will remember -remember that ways in which they've stolen our wealth, our hope, and our children's future. 

Democracy depends on building trust and honest, open communication for it's very survival. Democracy needs informed voters to make real choices, not Fox spin doctors telling us what to believe, who to trust,who to vote in, or out of office. A free press is the best friend the working people of this nation have ever had, and both Pennacchio and Trump seem to be doing their best two-step, hand in hand, dancing dancing, dancing around everything but the truth

The facts are in: Republican's retained seats in many states through restricting honest citizens access to the polls -- passing local legislation everywhere they had statehouse power to discourage real working people from voting. Why was it that working class neighborhoods throughout Republican controlled states had endless lines, absurd challenges and discriminatory voter verification at the polls?  The answer is simple: they don't believe in democracy, and they'll steal power in any way they can.

The latest scree is to suggest traditional Americans, Catholic," and "unionist"s are words synonymous with Trump's kind of bigotry.  Do they think trade unionist have no memory? That we will not remember repeated Republican efforts to gut unionism, their efforts to prevent union shops, their attempt to freeze or even eliminate minimum wage? 

The reality is Americans are among the most productive workers in the world, yet because of Republican opposition and takes-backs we endure a second rate health system whose entire cost is being dumped on the workers, we have the poorest vacation and leave compensation among the industrialised democracies,  and our pension and retirement system has been trashed - handed over lock, stock and barrel to the same "financial wizards of Wall Street who scream for deregulation, unembarrassed by recession after recession where our "great individually managed" 401K's (if we get one) earn money for the brokers and hucksters even as we lose 20% to 30% of the principal every few years as another seductive market "bubble" bursts.  

The only real bubbles in this mismanaged economy is in the champagne the brokers and bankers drink as they laugh at the working people of this country, laugh all the way to absurd salaries, bonus plans and stocks deals with our money. 

Of course they don't want us to remember that Republican courts and Republican legislation let the corporate raiders steal the real pensions workers used to have. They want us to forget that they're out to destroy Social Security, the last safety net for the elderly working man and woman - a net so thin that we see our elders standing at the doors of Walmarts trying to smile on the bosses command. Why do they do this? Because their pensions have been stolen by Wall Street and because Social Security increases are routinely block by Republicans. All this while the Republicans raise our taxes and lower the taxes on thee rich.

The more Republicans froth at the mouth - spouting off about unionism, Catholics and "traditional values" - the more clear it becomes that they simply can't abide the fact the people of this state, by clear majorities,  disagree  with them on almost every issue from healthcare to gun safety. In their version of "traditional values" the poor get poorer, workers get shafted and the 1% drinks champagne and laughs all the way to the bank. Those aren't Åmerican traditional values -- it just plain greed.

Religion of Peace

Since George Bush declared a war on terror, we Americans have been fighting among ourselves over who’s really got a religion of peace. Christians (especially those of a fundamentalist ilk,) have been making much of the Muslim terminology of jihad (Arabic for 'struggle'), while Muslims (mostly of the fundamentalist ilk) make much of the Christian language of "crusade." I'm not willing to talk about the nuances of either of these words, but I'll argue strenuously that anyone claiming Christianity is a religion of peace is not paying much attention to history.

In the 4th Century when the famous warrior emperor Constantine “got God” while butchering barbarians under a cross, the Jesus movement became the goto religion of the Roman Empire. Since then Christians have pretty much given up on their founder’s “turn the other cheek.” The Emperor wanted to link his rule to a religion with good rules, not start a slumber party for pacifists.

Faith based opposition to Imperial needs faded quickly. Helping out with slaughtering barbarians brought Imperial aid in snuffing out heretics and pagans, as well as Imperial support for church buildings and even some travel money for bishops, setting a pattern for a bright new church of the future: There would be crusades to fight, reformation wars to battle, slaves to be caught or bought, witches to burn, pogroms against Jews, scientists to imprison, physicians to murder, colonial peoples to proselytise, socialists to arrest, homosexuals to stone, etc. But for the average Joe & Mary it’s a religion of peace, right? Christianity is all about living with your neighbours sans violence, right? Well, maybe not.

What do you do if your neighbour’s a brute, or the king’s taxes are so high your kids will starve, or the local baron makes whoopee with your daughter or son, or the 1% send your job to and offers you retraining for an exciting career in fast food? Maybe it’s a small thing over and over — the dog that lets loose on your roses every morning. There’s got to be some justice, right? Are the Buddhists the only ones that can talk about bad karma?

The church has always made a lot of the idea of justice. Historically when the church speaks of justice, it's meant order. Just as Constantine wanted the Church to line up behind imperial policy, the local  warlords who emerged as kings and princes out of the ashes of the empire liked it when the church gave them backing. Soon enough those kings and princes were divinely authorised in their tyrannies. From the days of the empire through to today, dissident groups within the church found themselves suppressed by men carrying swords, divinely authorised swords. Even now the church turns its back on rabid injustices in parts of Latin America, favouring tyrants over the poor.

But if people are sometimes unhappy with justice as obedience to tyrants, the church had an answer for that: God will take care of it. If you think your tyrant is unjust, it'll all be taken care of, in purgatory, or even hell.

A  Christian Happy Dance circa 1670

At the dawn of the modern era there was a wildly popular book called Man - Microcosm. By 1670 it was entering its 3rd edition. The author offered a few verses, applied a cartoon and a sermon. This image is from a section called God’s swift punishments and the verse is from the Vulgate Bible: Luke 18, verse 7. It translates Will not God avenge his elect, who cry out to him day and night, though long he bears with them?

So what this odd picture shows is a Christian Happy Dance tapped to the tune of divine retribution. It’s not that Christians don’t believe in vengeance, it’s just that they’ve been told God will do it for them. Vengeance is mine, says the Christian God, holding the carrot of heaven and the big stick of a permanent sulphur flesh-eating hell. Oh yeah, that’s a religion of peace. You can understand how kings and robber barons want nice Christian subjects.

There are Jesus people who don’t buy into this, but they’re all too rare. God & country is just too cozy for all involved.

The Anniversary of Gautama Buddha’s Enlightenment 禅

A statue from a museum in Shanghai

 Today, December 8th is Rohatsu, celebrated in Zen Buddhism as the anniversary of Buddha’s enlightenment. In Zen monasteries all over the world, an octave of intense meditation ends today, completed with chanted ceremonies honouring the Buddha’s birth.

The historical Buddha, a man from northern India, was born in 563 BCE to a wealthy family. His name was Gautama, but he’s often called by the title Sakyamuni [sage of the Sakyas] or Tathāgata [thus-gone]. Sometimes one hears the name Siddhartha, but scholars suggest that’s not really a name, but another title,meaning “goal accomplisher.”

The stories told of his early life are varied but all offer one theme. As the child of a privileged family, he was shielded from the harsher aspects of life, but as a young man Gautama came to face the reality of suffering and strove to understand its meaning. Why is it that we exist, that we experience pain, that we die?

For years he tried finding answers in the already ancient Vedic religion and philosophies, in meditations under the tutelage of sages, and even in extreme asceticism, literally starving himself to the edge of death, but in the end Gautama realised his efforts were useless. So he sat beneath a great tree in silence. After 49 days in silence he came upon enlightenment, the shocking realisation that suffering (the Sanskrit word is dukkha) was not pain or death, but rather the struggle of consciousness grappling with pain and death, holding to the impermanent and conditional, grasping for a happiness that is always passing.

In his enlightenment, Gautama became known as a buddha, which simply means “awakened one.” His teachings are called the dharma and are thought to represent the actual structure of consciousness in the universe. Soon after his awakening great numbers of men and women began to follow his path. This community is called the sangha. In Zen, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha together are called the “Three Jewels,” and represent a kind of summary of both the method and purpose of Buddhism. To formally become a Buddhist, one simply says:

I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.

I take refuge in the Sangha.

Gautama lived to be 80 years old. His death is thought to be a finalisation or completion of his awakening. But from his experience in silence under the tree till his death, the sangha grew rapidly. Thousands learned the Dharma, and the community of practice spread from region to region — west to the edges of Europe and east through China to Japan.

There are many paths within Buddhism, many interpretations of the Dharma, and many versions of the Sangha. Contrary to what many Westerners believe, there are also many Buddhas. Gautama was not the first to achieve enlightenment, nor the last.  Zen is in fact part of a larger movement within Buddhism where every member of the Sangha vows to defer final enlightenment until every other living being is freed from suffering.

One thing can be said with complete certainty about Gautama: He is not a god. Because Buddhism is (erroneously) referred to as a “religion,” many Westerners assume it must be about God. It is not.

The metaphysical god of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in reply to the philosophical questions of late antiquity was defined as immortal, all knowing, all seeing, etc.  It is widely assumed in the West that this kind of monotheism represents 000a more mature and sophisticated kind of belief than polytheism. This of course is patently self-serving nonsense. The idea that religions evolve out of primitive polytheism into a more complex and sophisticated monotheism is rooted in the unspoken dogma of European empires and colonialism where religious superiority functioned as a justification for racial and political bigotry. The missionary came hand in hand with a colonial administrator. The loving Gospel served as an inexpensive adjunct in service to the rapacious demand for resources needed by European and American factories.

In Zen Buddhism, gods are optional.  Japan, where American Zen has its roots, is a land of complex polytheisms. Gods (most are called Kami) are seen in places of beauty or starkness and in all sorts of events from the growth of a flower to great wind storms. Some kami are scary, some sublime. Japan’s major religion, Shinto, codifies these to a degree, but it’s a loose system that allows communities, families and individuals a great latitude in responding to perceptions of holiness. Buddhism in Japan isn’t allergic to these ideas, but its core teachings suggest that gods, if they exist at all, are caught up in the same suffering as the rest of us. The best that a god can do is offer a temporary shelter from suffering. In Japan, that’s a reasonable definition of heaven.

But for all the tomes written about the Buddha, here’s a single line from a 12th Century monk that captures the essence of Zen Buddhism’s message"

Within nothingness there’s a road out of the dust.
                        The monk Yuanwu Keqin (1063 - 1135 CE) The Blue Cliff Record