Everything Is Time

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

"We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

[…]

"Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. […] The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

[…]

"A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event.' It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

"The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. […] They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

What Dr. Rovelli, internationally noted theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, is saying here, is that a rock isn't an object; it's an event. Which is true of literally every "thing"; they're phenomena, not matter. They only exist for a specific time, their natures changing from moment to moment. So time is the only thing objectively present in that space.

We think objects are solid and exist because we can't grasp the temporary (the word means "subject to time") nature of matter and energy – which are the components of "stuff".

But stuff is an illusion. (More accurately, it's a hasty conclusion, leading to a practical fiction.)

So the good doctor has at long last caught science up with Zen, of which this notion of an "empty" universe, where things don't really exist, but are instead an ever-changing stream of dependent co-arising (scientists call it "attraction") that never attains stasis, is a fundamental teaching.

Which is why every "thing" in the universe – you and me and rocks and trees and amœbas and planets and galaxies and Labrador retrievers – aren't objects or things at all, or even matter, but events.

Literal products of time, having a beginning and end, because the agglomeration of attractions that make us all up never settles on a permanent relationship, and eventually dissipates entirely, its components running off to join other processes, in the manner of a wave or a cloud.

Thanks to Brad Warner, whose latest book, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being, alerted me to Dr. Rovelli's thoughts on this matter.

(Who, by the way, is also a professor emeritus of L'Université Aix-Marseille Luminy, where I spent a year in the late 80s. An observation à propos of nothing but my startled satisfaction.)


(Photo courtesy of Neil Owen and Wikimedia.com.)

WW: Derelict treehouse

(Kids love treehouses, but the treehouse years are few and fleeting, and as the demographics of a neighbourhood age and change, those much-loved adult-proof hideaways quickly return to the source.

This one is relatively unusual, in that it was built by adults to an actual plan, and features a host of architectural novelties. (It's also not even technically a treehouse, since no part of it is a tree, but I'm sure the child who owned it considered it one.)

And though its construction was obviously both time-consuming and expensive so far as such structures go, within just a few years – that probably seemed like months to the child's parents – its owner grew up and out, and with no other potential residents in the vicinity, even this carriage-trade example became uninhabitable.

Which is why you see many more abandoned treehouses than occupied ones.

So next time you see an occupied treehouse, take note. Because chances are you're seeing impermanence in action.)



Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Boom Town

Where it swelled near its confluence with the Willapa River, Wilson Creek bore incongruous signs of heavy industry: breastworks of peeled cedar, crumbling now and wrenched apart by ramming drift, and a few pilings left standing midriver, where log booms once floated.

Here in the 1850s, Daniel Wilson built the area's first mill, to rip the logs that ox teams skidded off the surrounding hills. It would have had a sash saw – essentially, a giant handsaw, pumped back and forth by a steam engine that chugged so slowly the sawyer could almost fish the river between passes. The planks it wore off in this way were stacked on scows tied along the breastworks, to be taken first to Raymond and South Bend, and thence the ports of the world. Soon steamers stopped here as well, and the busy town of Willapa sprang into being, complete with shops and hotels.

It all happened in weeks, and a few years later, when the big trees were all gone, it unhappened just as fast.

What remained – a sleepy village and a small primary school – is now called Old Willapa.


(From an earlier draught of my book, 100 Days on the Mountain. Photo of the Willapa country courtesy of Tony Webster and Wikimedia Commons.)

Gone, Gone

This morning a brother in my Twitter sangha posted the following five paragraphs from the Pali canon (Dutiyaassutavāsutta, SN 12.62).

OK, four, plus intro. That, with allowance made for the verbose, refrain-heavy nature of Buddhist scripture, really comes to about half as much.

Nevertheless, I've dropped a TLDR at the end for the hard-of-waiting.

(Note: "disillusioned" is a positive thing in Buddhist texts. It means "freed from delusion". When you think about it, it's weird that we use that word as a complaint in English.)

So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. …

“Mendicants, when it comes to this body made up of the four primary elements, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to accumulate and disperse, to be taken up and laid to rest. That’s why, when it comes to this body, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But when it comes to that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, or freed. Why is that? Because for a long time they’ve been attached to it, thought of it as their own, and mistaken it: ‘This is mine, I am this, this is my self.’ That’s why, when it comes to this mind, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But an unlearned ordinary person would be better off taking this body made up of the four primary elements to be their self, rather than the mind. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to last for a year, or for two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or a hundred years, or even longer.

But that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night. It’s like a monkey moving through the forest. It grabs hold of one branch, lets it go, and grabs another; then it lets that go and grabs yet another. In the same way, that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night.

TLDR: It's not hard to accept that our bodies are temporary. What we really don't like is that our personhood is just as biodegradable. It changes constantly – we cease to exist and then reappear in different form from moment to moment – until one day no trace, physical or metaphysical, remains of us.

Reading this, I became disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

Deep bow to my brother.


(Photo of a fragment from an 18th century Thai anthology of Pali canon teachings courtesy of the Chester Beatty Library [Dublin] and Wikimedia Commons.)

The End of All Things

"I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds."

Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita

(A variant Hindu translation of the Oppenheimer quotation more famous in the West.)


(Photo courtesy of Robert Couse-Baker and Wikimedia Commons.)

Ask a Dinosaur

Insight from a sangha-mate on Mastodon (appropriately enough):

One of the most important ideas to sit with – amid the convulsion of climate change – is that Earth was not made for us.

That idea flies against many religions, but also appears in secular settings, with even activists thinking of Earth as a sort of organic machine, a spaceship, a system that’s carefully balanced in absolute ways.

Those metaphors have power, but they’re ultimately unhelpful. Our place here is precarious because we don’t 'belong' in any cosmic sense.

We’re just here.

(Photo of a well-worn dinosaur path in Colorado courtesy of James St. John and Wikimedia Commons.)

Anitya Kyôsaku

Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen,
Zen hermit monk


(Photo courtesy of Dean Hochman and Wikimedia Commons.)

Mending The Roof

After 20 years of this I know that practice is not like mending a roof and now the roof doesn't leak. It's more like patching a roof and now it doesn't leak there anymore. With each subsequent sit you patch another leak, until sooner or later you're replacing that first patch again, and then the rest, and placing still more new ones.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

We don't mend things in this practice. We practice mending things. This isn't why they call it "practice", but from now on it's why I do.

For some this open-endedness is a hard truth. It leads some non-Zenners to reject our religion out of hand, on the grounds that it's unproductive. I've tried pointing out that it has this in common with everything else – that material productivity is ephemeral at best, in all contexts – but they tend to defend their thesis by defining their terms very narrowly. ("My family life isn't unproductive. My wife and kids make me happy." I sincerely hope so… but your investment won't return any longer or better than mine. This statistic greatly disturbs some folks, in a culture that encourages us to view achievement as a thing that somehow outlives the achiever.)

All of which is old news for any Zen student of average smugness. So it's a bit galling that many of those think practice can change your fundamental nature: stop pain from hurting, loss from evoking grief, discomfort and lack of control from generating fear and anger. The patches you lay today will remain in place forever if you practice properly, they insist. Eventually you'll have a whole roof.

Or to put it scientifically, that web of random gravitational attraction holding in momentary proximity a squirming conglomeration of volatile components, none of which is a roof, will become a roof.

The only roof in the universe, no less. Because that's the power of a single human being and its mighty attitude.

And so the eternal issue of why practice comes up again. As we face the daily failure and futility of this existence – the fact that the register of paths we didn't take is multiplying hourly – we start to feel like frauds. We aren't buddhas. We don't have control of our emotions and reactions. We're still getting angry and sad and disheartened. We aren't sitting enough, or right, or maybe at all, sometimes.

In these moments I try to stop beating myself up for not being fixed. To look beyond complaints that my progress isn't permanent, my product isn’t perfect, and my monkery hasn't made me greater than the human being I was when I started.

Bit much to ask innit, in a universe where none of those things are possible.

But I can nail a mean patch now. I can bang down others as well, at standard human speed, with standard human results.

After which the roof is less broken, even if it isn't fixed.

If not this, what would you have me do?


Fondest compliments to the Nation of Seekers. This thing we do isn't easy, but neither is anything else.



(Photo courtesy of Sergeant Gustavo Olgiati, US Army; the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service; and Wikimedia Commons.)

Stuff I Thought Would Pass

As a meditation on the unreliable nature of impermanence, I offer this week an incomprehensive list of dubious fads I assumed would long have returned to obscurity by now:

Bottled water
Right wing politics
Racism
Free market fundamentalism and "free" trade.
Wearing your trousers hanging off your arse
Evangelical Christianity
Obscenity-filled rap
Twitter
Wearing shorts year-round
Self-defeating copyright enforcement
Private healthcare schemes
Reality television
New Age malarkey
Proscription of ex-convicts
Man-hating feminism
Wearing beach thongs as actual footwear
Red-baiting (you know, now there's no Reds)
Misogyny
Liberal parties without platform or ideology
Churchie Zen
Undirected development and exploitation of land
The notion that sex is the worst thing that can happen to you
Hatred of foreigners

It's worth pointing out that a few positive things have also survived my scepticism. Wikipedia and Internet radio come to mind. 

(Photo courtesy of Andreas Trepte and Wikimedia Commons.)

Change

… is something I don't like.

Yeah, I know; Zen is all about acceptance of the immutable, ubiquitous, unresting nature of the universe, and everything in it.

Adopt any religious stance you wish. Invent convoluted ideologies; offer university degrees in them. Devote your life to denial.

But immutable, ubiquitous, unresting change is the literal substance of the universe.

I've needed to migrate this blog to a new host for years now. Blogger was arguably never the best platform for it, and since 2011 the interface has slowly deteriorated to a point where basic functions (comments, search-engine accessibility, mobile compatibility, several others) are sub-par.

As readers have signalled problems, I've assured them that I'm looking into moving. It's just that learning a new platform is long and annoying, costing a fortune in time and frustration, futzing to accomplish basic layout tasks, leaving and revisiting messages on help fora, emailing one's data-engineer brother for yet another pro bono debugging session.

None of which holds my interest. I'm a writer. I don't want to be a code monkey, a salesman, a celebrity, or anything other than a monk who writes on a wall.

But to do that in this new world, you first have to build the wall. Paint the wall. Maintain the wall. Rebuild the wall. Repaint the wall…

And now Blogger have upgraded the wall.

And you know what the word "upgrade" means in digital commerce.

So it's time to move.

The next weeks may be a bit spare in terms of content here, but I expect to be scrawling on a new and better wall when I reach the other side.

One that resolves many of the problems you have with this one.

(Deep bow of gratitude for the patience, forbearance, and loyalty readers have shown through the years.)

The backlog will remain available here on Blogger for as long as they'll have it. (Indefinitely, in theory.) I'd like to migrate that content to the new site as well – another giant headache, when even possible – but one way or the other, I expect to keep the past 9 years of ruminations accessible, to whatever end fellow sojourners may put them.

I'm particularly chagrined at the thought of losing long-time followers, some of whom may only swing by once in a while, but all of whom are deeply appreciated. Churn of that sort is unfortunately the nature of online publishing, but in all candour, assurances that the hot new platform will more than make up for the statistical loss with new readers, are cold comfort.

Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

And my readers aren't numbers.

So please be advised that Rusty Ring will soon have a new URL. And I look forward to seeing you there, fit and rested from the break.

(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous creator.)

No State of Emergency

Events this week have me thinking about my favourite Zen teaching story. (I say that about all of them, though my very favourites are the ones I take the piss out of in this journal.)

The gist goes like this:

A bandit army descended on a town, causing all the monks in the local monastery to abandon it, except the master.

Bursting into the zendo, the pirate general was enraged to find the old monk calmly dusting the altar, not even deigning to bow.

“Do you not realise,” he shouted, “that I would run you through without a second thought?”

“And do you not realise,” said the master, “that I would be run through without a second thought?”

At this the general bowed and left.

This is one of those tales we Zenners like to exchange with pious smiles, certain of its allegory, and that we'll never be held to the conviction it implies.

And now here we are.

The plague our species is currently facing puts me in a surrealistic place. Whenever I've imagined myself in an apocalyptic scenario – which is frequently, given my culture's obsession with it – I've seen myself meeting the aftermath of war, natural disaster, or economic crisis beside my neighbours, pooling our skills, standing firm against the selfish and the predatory, guiding our community to peace, promise, and security.

But in an epidemic, you have to board yourself up in your house, see to your own needs, and avoid catching or communicating the sickness to others.

And so stillness and acceptance must be the discipline, in full knowledge that very bad things might happen. And you must not go out and do combat with them, or call for help from others, or even, God forbid, open the door to curse at them.

Instead you must remain heroically immobile. To borrow an image from Thich Nhat Hanh, you must be "lake-still, mountain-solid".

In other words, I am now living the worst nightmare of all religiosos: actually having to practice what I preach.

The death and mortal-threat fables that abound in our religion distinguish it from other faiths. (Some may quibble that traditional Christianity, with its endless recitations of gruesome martyrdom, takes this laurel, but I would counter that those are journalism, placing the listener outside of events. Our tales make him or her inhabit the dying character.)

Such stories as The Tiger and the Strawberry, or The Mother and the Mustard Seed, exist for a pedagogical purpose. They remind us of the knife-edge we walk, that we must walk, and the impermanence of all things, including ourselves. The intent is to jangle us out of the chains of our dread, and into the freedom that acknowledgement confers.

We are not the universe. We are not the most important thing in the universe. It was just fine before we got here, and it will be just fine after we leave.

And so will we.

Because this life is not the goal of this life.

Understanding that, and practicing it, is the origin of strength.

There is no "state of emergency" in Buddhism, aside from the one we were born into and can't resolve without practice. There's no Buddhist constitution that can be suspended when it becomes inconvenient. The law is immutable.

And that's a gift.

So now is the time to do all that stuff we've been saying we do.

Now is the time to practice Zen.

In taking the cushion, let us cleave to our humanity, care for our fellow Earthlings, and maintain our grasp of reality.

Because we have no alternative.


(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)

Addiction

If you'd told me when I was 22 that the day would come when I would cherish my ex-girlfriends, I would have called you mad.

As a young man, I did relationships like a drug. Heroin, to be specific. I loved hard, like diamonds, and lost harder. I wore rejection like a crown of thorns, bled from it like stigmata, dragged it across the earth like the Holy Cross. Cowardice, caprice, indifference, were feminine vagaries I could not forgive.

I was the ex-boyfriend from hell.

I don't know what changed. I didn't hear from my ex-girlfriends for years, and then I did. And I was ecstatic, like a pilgrim who falls to his knees on the far edge of the desert, weeping for the pain, and laughing for the weeping.

No-one was more surprised than I.

So perhaps, sometimes, even I grow up.

Perhaps even heal.

My ex-girlfriends are interesting, caring, engaging women, and a gift to my life. They have great husbands, brilliant children, and there is nothing I wouldn't do for any of them.

There's no word for this unexpected love. It's not possessive, like a lover's, or exclusive, like a brother's, or conditional, like a friend's.

It just is.

And whatever it is, it brings me endless joy.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Peter Dowley and Wikimedia Commons.)

Ownership

"This is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.”

the Buddha

(Photo courtesy of Max Pixel and a generous photographer.)

Just Because You Don't Exist Doesn't Mean You Can't Have Integrity

Last week a reader posted a provocative question under Everything Doesn't Happen For a Reason:

"If one is not seeking to avoid pain [under Zen]," he asked, "should one look both ways before crossing the street?"

I confess to a weakness for this kind of Jesuitical repartee, though Zen teachers are famous for screaming "Katz!" at, slapping, or throwing hot tea on those who attempt it. The impulse is honest; since such queries arise in the discursive mind – whose self-centred, dualistic viewpoint is suited only to housekeeping – indulging them can block insight. Anglophones call the result "can't see the forest for the trees".

However, this case addresses a pitfall common to spiritual pursuits – the tendency to confuse theoretical truth with operational – and I think it's well worth exploring.

First, a point of order: Zen students are not taught not to avoid pain; we're taught to accept pain as inevitable. But notwithstanding Zen monasteries manufacture it on an industrial scale, the Buddha did say that enduring avoidable suffering is worthless to enlightenment practice.

However, the underlying issue here goes much deeper than practice forms; it's nothing less than the nature of existence. And I'm pleased to report that science has finally caught up with Buddhism in one essential detail:

Nothing exists.

The Buddha of course knew nothing about particle physics. He drew his conclusions from simple observation of his surroundings, albeit with delusion-corrected eyes. Now, two and a half millennia later, physicists can explain why stuff appears to exist, while in fact not existing.

Since I'm not one of them, I'll just cleave to their hypothesis here: most, possibly all, of what we consider "matter" is actually a cloud of electrical charges in transitory association. This is basically the same insight the Buddha handed down (though again, he had no notion of electricity), but science has extended it infinitely: molecules are tiny solar systems of atoms, which are tiny solar systems of subatomic particles, which are tiny solar systems of smaller particles, and so on.

To bring this all home, here's a scientific assertion I recently encountered online:

If you removed all of the empty space from every person on earth, the amassed matter of our entire species would amount to the volume of a sugar cube. (And if your discursive mind is well-oiled, it's now asking: "How do you know even that matter exists?" Exactly.)

Right. So that's all spacey n'all, but what does it mean? Well, to perhaps no-one's surprise at this point…

Nothing.

Seriously. OK, so you're a cloud and so is your piano. Go run through it.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

With any good luck, no-one will have tried. Because even though neither you nor your piano exist, there are other rules in play. Such as the one that says your particles can't trespass in the electrical fields of piano particles, even though all the particles are mostly the same, and you and your furniture are mostly empty space anyway.

In other words, just because you don't exist doesn't mean you can't have integrity. (And if I had any business sense I'd be selling t-shirts with that on.)

The koanic literature contains a few parables on the dilemma of simultaneously existing and not existing. My favourite involves a monk who goes out on his begging rounds after learning that nothing he sees is really there. When a rampaging elephant comes stomping down the road (and really, who among us hasn't been there?) the loyal young student, fresh from dokusan, focuses his mind on the elephant's non-existence.

And is immediately trampled. He limps back to his teacher and complains loudly that the teaching is false.

The teacher sighs, and says:

Alright. Here is the whole truth:

Nothing you see is really there.

And when a stampeding elephant is bearing down on you, get out of its way.

The monk confused theoretical truth (everything you see is a squirming splotch of promiscuously recombining particles, so whatever you think is there, isn't there) with operational truth (regardless of how temporary you and the elephant are, it hurts when one steps on you.)

And so, to accept my honoured reader's dharma challenge, I am bold to say:

Yes. One should look both ways before stepping into the street, unless one does not mind being creamed by a briefly-manifesting moving van.

At this point, some will ask: "What good is theoretical truth if it won't save you from being creamed by a slowly-dispersing moving van?"

Now that's a question.


(Photo of Namibian road sign courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer. You gotta respect the nation that posts "Mind the Paradox of Non-Existence" warnings along its highways.)

Economics

(The following is a passage from Rough Around the Edges, a manuscript I began 20 years ago. Though my Zen practice was still about six years in the future, it's interesting to me today to read a fundamentally exact description of what the Buddha called "world weariness" – the mainspring of enlightenment practice – written in my own pre-monastic hand. Like the man said, we come by it honestly.)

The problem, the problem. What is the problem?

You're born. Somewhere, someone sets an egg timer. For a quarter-hour you rave like a rich man in a burning mansion, snatching at a vase, a string of pearls, anything to show you lived there.

The timer dings; you're unborn. The necklace falls to the ground.

We get it about wealth. The prophets have all warned us. But there are other treasures just as fleeting.

I hunger for love, to share life, and not to be alone. Except it won't do. Even if you find love, the timer still goes ding. The necklace falls to the ground.

What's the problem? I'm afraid to die alone. But I live alone. I work alone, and most of the time, I love alone.

The seconds tick. The words echo in my mind. A thought occurs:

Perhaps the most valuable thing in that house is the fire.




(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the mechanics of egg-timing courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and generous photographer.)

Issa Nails The Thing

Kobayashi Issa is my all-time favourite poet. Regular readers will find this tediously typical, for though he's one of Japan's Four Great Haiku Masters, Issa is not "the Zen one". (That would be Bashō. I like Bashō too, but he doesn't "hit" for me nearly as often as Issa.)

Issa annoys modern Zen on many levels. He was ordained in the Jōdo-shū sect, a Pure Land Buddhist denomination that Zenners (including myself) find a bit futile. Worse yet, he was a hermit, and on the contemporary model: he had a family, and socketed his stick dead-centre of the Red Dust World.

Yet his descriptions of hermit practice, and his distillations of eremitical insight, are the most concise, most incisive, and most accurate I've found.

Witness his most famous lines, written hours after his baby daughter died:

This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet.
And yet.

That simply can't be improved. If you take anything out, it falls short. If you put anything in, it collapses.

Non-Buddhists may miss the sad satire here. Our teachers often compare human existence (mistakenly but universally called "the world") to dew: it comes from nowhere, sparkles for minutes, and goes back to nowhere. Attachment to same – craving permanence in the eternally temporary – is the origin of suffering.

Accepting this sets us up for cushion error: proudly declaring that we're liberated, because we know the truth.

And yet.
And yet.

Starting to get why this middle-aged suburban church-boy so troubles Zenners?

He's also easy-going, an affront to Zen's samurai puritanism, and accepting of his own nature. His perspective is, in short, eremitical.

Exhibit B:

Napped half the day
no one
punished me.

On the eremitical path, you do what practice suggests. This is different from monastery life, where you do what order demands, what tradition demands, sometimes what the current master demands, whether it makes sense or not.

Life inside requires that kind of discipline; life outside, another kind. Issa's poem suggests that on this day, this was the right call.

And as always, his trademark self-mockery. "If only I were half the monk I claim to be."

Word.

Note the same theme, with a different conclusion, here:

Napping at midday
I hear the song of rice planters
and feel ashamed of myself.

And then there's me on ango:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

And what of those elegant Zen dilettantes, as hip in the West today as they were in 18th century Japan?

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

I gotta stop there or I'll copy and paste every poem my brother ever wrote. (I've literally never found one – not one – that isn't my favourite.) If these crumbs have whetted your appetite, you may binge at will here.

OK, one more. Until next week, here's Issa's take on being a haikunist. (Essentially, the blogger of his time and place.)

Pissing in the snow
outside my door
it makes a very straight hole.

(Photo of Kobayashi Issa's monument courtesy of 震天動地 and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: The way of all things

(On the beach in front of an old log dump, closed since the early 80s. Remains of an ancient automobile.)

WW: Winter kill

(Deer bones found on the forest floor.)

The Way of All Things

This toney giant suburb was recently thrown (and is still being thrown) up here on our remote North Coast beach. The houses in the picture, sited directly on the ocean, are of course the most expensive.

A few weeks ago we got lots of rain. "Lots of rain" is sort of the definition of this coast. And so, therefore, is "massive landslide". (See illustration.)

I've been on this beach for almost 50 years. In that time it has changed dramatically, and I'm not talking about the housing estate. An extensive dune system, entirely absent when I was 7, now lines the shore. Entire ecosystems that I grew up with are gone, replaced with brand new ones: new plants, new animals, new worlds.

Look at the cliff face in the photo, above those dunes that weren't there. See all that brush growing on either side of the flume, and the stuff the slide scraped off, piled at its foot? None of that vegetation was there either; the entire headland, for miles north and south, was slick, barren, shiny red clay.

None of these changes were human-caused. It's just what happens here. We live on the precipice of a planetary-scale body of seawater that is literally never still. Dirt doesn't stay put in this place. Doesn't matter how much dirt there is.

Nor how rich you are. Fact is, even if you encased the entire cliff in reinforced concrete (seen it), you'd only buy yourself a few decades; the North Pacific eats solid basalt like candy, so concrete is basically its popcorn.

I struggle not to feel satisfaction over the above scene; I know that these people are essentially innocent of ill intent. (Maybe a little good old-fashioned self-centredness, but who among us…) And I'm mostly annoyed that their town-in-a-box is destroying a lifestyle I've always known, loved, and somehow considered a right. Obviously, the thousand-odd people it contains love the new lifestyle better. And as much as I rebel against the notion, at ground level, both opinions are equally (in)valid.

'Course, ground level changes. Down here, it changes a lot. And despite human arrogance – inflated exponentially by wealth – it will continue to do.

Members of my generation were raised on a succession of annihilation threats. Nuclear war. Pollution. Climate change. But since I was a small boy I've loved to look out to sea and know that it will always be there. Long after the last living one of us has belted out the last political speech demonstrating conclusively that there is no threat, the sea, in whatever shape, filled with whatever creatures, will pound this shore.

Wherever it is; ten-thousand years ago the beach was eleven miles west of here. Since then, multiple towering tsunamis have instantly smashed out brand-new worlds stretching miles inland; the last time just 300 years ago. Chances are better than zero that in another century or so my grandfather's house – built on the bluff that tsunami created – will have slid under the surf.

But the ocean will endure. Nothing short of a nova is going to change that.

And it's not even a little bit arrogant.

New Year's Song: Et dans 150 ans

To commemorate this New Year's Day 2015 I offer a meditation on the passage of time. My brother's poetry here is so powerful I first took him for a Canadian. But on second listening I thought, no.

No. The prosody, the peculiar flow of his French; his unflinching insight, his cool under fire. This-here is a Frenchman.

Except better. Raphaël Haroche's father is a Moroccan Jew of Russian descent; his mother is Argentine. In other words, dude's a perfect storm. Prepare for bone-crystallising kensho.

Having said that, I should warn non-francophones that, as Canadian literary critic Mavis Gallant pointed out, "When poetry is translated, the result is either not faithful, not poetry, or not English." Here the author spins kaleidoscopic metaphors and convoluted word play (e.g., "bad choices" can also be "wrong guesses"; "let's drink to the street trash" becomes "let's leave them our empty coffins" when you turn it a certain way); as translator, I could only pick a shade and run with it. With luck the music and intonations will salvage some lost depth (and soften the stilted, un-English sequence of images) for non-French-speaking readers.

Finally, since the visuals in Raphaël's videos are famous for being a whole second song, I strongly recommend that you first just listen, without viewing, while reading the lyrics (below). That way your own impressions won't get wangled. Then, play the video again and just watch it, without reading. Mind blown a second time.

ET DANS 150 ANS
par Raphaël

Et dans 150 ans, on s'en souviendra pas De ta première ride, de nos mauvais choix, De la vie qui nous baise, de tous ces marchands d'armes, Des types qui votent les lois là-bas au gouvernement, De ce monde qui pousse, de ce monde qui crie, Du temps qui avance, de la mélancolie, La chaleur des baisers et cette pluie qui coule, Et de l'amour blessé et de tout ce qu'on nous roule, Alors souris. Dans 150 ans, on s'en souviendra pas De la vieillesse qui prend, de leurs signes de croix, De l'enfant qui se meurt, des vallées du Tiers monde, Du salaud de chasseur qui descend la colombe, De ce que t'étais belle, et des rives arrachées, Des années sans sommeil, 100 millions d'affamés Des portes qui se referment de t'avoir vue pleurer, De la course solennelle qui condamne sans ciller, Alors souris. Et dans 150 ans, on n'y pensera même plus À ce qu'on a aimé, à ce qu'on a perdu, Allez vidons nos bières pour les voleurs des rues! Finir tous dans la terre, mon dieu! Quelle déconvenue. Et regarde ces squelettes qui nous regardent de travers, Et ne fais pas la tête, ne leur fais pas la guerre, Il leur restera rien de nous, pas plus que d'eux, J'en mettrais bien ma main à couper ou au feu, Alors souris. Et dans 150 ans, mon amour, toi et moi, On sera doucement, dansant, 2 oiseaux sur la croix, Dans ce bal des classés, encore je vois large, P't'être qu'on sera repassés dans un très proche, un naufrage, Mais y a rien d'autre à dire, je veux rien te faire croire, Mon amour, mon amour, j'aurai le mal de toi, Mais y a rien d'autre à dire, je veux rien te faire croire, Mon amour, mon amour, j'aurai le mal de toi, Mais que veux-tu?

And in 150 years we won't remember Your first wrinkle, our bad choices How life screwed us over, and all those weapons dealers Who work for the men who pass laws for the government This pushy world, this screaming world The march of time, the melancholy The warmth of the kisses, and how the rain trickled And the love lost, and the ways they get you And so we must smile. In 150 years we won't remember How age subtracts, and hypocrisy crosses itself The dying children, the depths of the Third World The asshole hunters who blow away doves How beautiful you were, and the things ripped away The years without sleep, and 100 million hungry How doors swing shut if people see you cry The universal impulse to condemn without qualm And so we must smile. And in 150 years, we won't even recall The things we loved, and those we lost Come on, let's drink to the street trash! My God, we'll all end up in the ground! Such a disappointment! Just look how those skeletons sneer at us But don't glare back; don't make war on them They'll keep nothing of us -- or themselves -- in the end As well cut off my hands, or burn them And so we must smile. And in 150 years, my love, you and I Will be – softly, dancing – two birds carved on a tombstone In this high school prom for dropouts, I'm looking beyond Maybe we'll come back some day; shipwrecked, perhaps But there's nothing for it, and I don't want to lie My love, my love, I'll miss you so But there's nothing for it, and I don't want to lie My love, my love, I'll miss you so But what can we do?

He's right, brothers and sisters. In 150 years, no-one will remember a thing we've done or said, or that we ever lived; for the vast majority of us, our very names will never be pronounced again.

You can take it for cruelty or compassion, but you can't change it. Our human being survives time like a beetle survives a millstone. And in the same form.

May we all cultivate, in the coming year, that which endures.