(Originally written around yearend 2011) A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the continent of invisible possessions from…
Some Principles of Corporate Communication
September 22, 2012 These are some notes from a book I’m working on about surviving as a worker in a modern corporate environment. “I don’t know (yet)” is a valid response. (And ignoring me is not). I get this all the time; perhaps you’ve experienced it once in a while too: I want to know what’s…
Of Consumption and Reception
September 23, 2012 I guess someone put these out so they’d be taken. Well, I “received” them. It’s a point I’ve made before about language: when you think about “taking pictures,” you’re in that mindset of getting-consuming-owning that I think is at the root of much our culture’s weedy darkness. Whenever I go out with the…
Affirming the Coalescent
January 17, 2014 We all experience the invisible world in our lives. Even those of us who believe in the methods and proofs of science, to the exclusion of all other modes of reaching belief, know of love, truth, insight, and trust. Such things do not fit comfortably into the systems built by and upon…
Of Claim
December 2, 2012 Karen Horney, the brilliant post-Freudian psychoanalyst, had an expression that informed much of her work, her contribution to the still-evolving process of retreat from the Freudian religion. Her term for one common source of the psychological distress she encountered in patients was “neurotic claim.” I guess my only complaint with it would…
Chopin: Artist of the Underworld
March 5, 2012 Amid tough and painful times we must seek consolation — handholds of inspiration on the cliff beside the abyss. Too many in our culture turn to false and artificial means of consolation. Consumption, for example. It was once the name of a fatal disease now known as tuberculosis; it is now the name of…
Notes From a Cemetery
November 1, 2013 We are addicted to hard, rigid, stony memorials. Yet the 2,000+ year old silk and bamboo on which the poems attributed to Lao Tzu were recorded survive today and are perfectly legible, while the carved scribbles memorializing the legacy of George Fry at the close of his 66 yrs. and 3.5 days — they…
The Bridge That No One Crosses
July 1, 2012 The contrast between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges reminds me of an old Zen story, which I heard from Clarke Strand, one of my teachers in Zen. One weekend many years ago, a Zen temple in upstate New York had organized a public reception to raise awareness and attract interest. Near the…
A Necessary Blasphemy
March 18, 2013 Impoverishment is relative. That is to say, relativistic in the sense that Einstein intended it. Neither space nor time is a separate dimension of any reality; they can only exist cooperatively as a continuum of experience and meaning. I may be thrown out of my apartment or I may endure another month…
Ending Genocide: Tender Faces of Spring Grass
May 4, 2015 A long time ago my father told me what his father told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus [white men]. He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the…