Tag: buddhism

Absence

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

In college, during the worst of the bad times, there were several warnings that were all trying to tell me that what I was feeling was not going to go away by itself, not without help. One of the saddest to me was when I was daydreaming about the idea of having some kind of magical skip button, and to just skip the next three months of my life. The fantasy made me really happy, and then crushingly sad at the idea that it would seem so nice to throw away three months of my life.

When I started writing in this space again at the beginning of the year, I was hoping to do three things. First, I wanted to redirect my daily journaling so that I begin to keep a creative notebook that was purely inspiration and ideas. Second, I wanted to practice the daily act of creativity and vulnerability through this real time memoir. Third, I wanted to encourage the daily act of noticing, of treating each day as a new thing, a new script, new raw material.

I forgot what it was like to not want to notice each day. To reach the end of the day exhausted at having made it to the end, grateful for the chance to be asleep and to forget, to be invisible even to yourself.

//

I woke up confused as to why I had a slight headache and I was grumpier than usual before remembering that I had technically had enough to drink to have a tiny hangover. I couldn’t quite tell if I was up earlier or later than usual because of the time zone, but I decided to get myself up and showered because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Joanne was still downstairs where he had slept, and I tried to invite him to breakfast but he was showering and after waiting a few minutes for him to finish decided I’d rather be alone anyway.

After the apocalyptic rain and flooding last night, the bright blue sky outside was totally weird. All of the massive puddles disappeared, and despite crazy scenes like in the video above, everything seemed to go back to normal, as though everybody that was inconvenienced by the storm had overreacted.

Since I rolled in a little earlier than usual, the bagel shop was busier than usual. I spotted friends but quickly realized that they were deep into an intense conversation that I didn’t want to get near. I ended up sharing a table with a guy with a t-shirt that had letters made out of bacon spelling out “BAE.”

I pulled out my computer and Kindle and continued my project of straightening out the metadata to my ebooks, the kind of bread and butter activity of someone with the digital collectors personality. I’ve been an ebook reader since I got my first smartphone at the beginning of college, but I didn’t understand how different a reading paradigm an e-ink book reader would be. The device’s storage versus the fairly small file size of an ebook means that it’s totally feasible to keep every book that I own on the device and never have to think about managing the library. It’s built in dictionary and Wikipedia tools mean that I don’t have to pull out my phone to look something up, but it’s browser is clumsy enough that i’m not tempted to waste time surfing feeds on it.

The first book that I chose to read on my new gadget was Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I’ve been getting interested in Gary Snyder for a little while. He was a Reed College graduate, and I have affection and nostalgia for the generation of students that he represents (a great many students have been thusly trapped, I am not alone). After coming to Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity through Brain Pickings,  I’ve had a tremendous appetite for writing from the first wave of Buddhism in the West Coast. After a conversation with David where he described being impatient with writers from that time for their superficial engagement with Buddhism, I felt compelled to argue against him but also like I was on shaky ground. This is a long wind up to get to this: I was prepared to read Bums and be taken with the Gary Snyder character and thus be able to go back to David and argue that, yes, their understanding of Buddhism might have been limited by their cultural inflexibility, but they were engaging with sincere questions in a sincere way.

I was not expecting to find the fucking Magna Carta Holy Grail of hipster manchildren. Japhy Ryder “learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar,” “got interested in old fashioned IWW anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old worker songs,” “lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours… with nothing in it,” clothed in “hand-me-downs bought secondhand with a bemused and happy expression in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores,” and, of course, smokes rollies.

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If that perfectly describes like eight guys and two women that I’ve met since moving to Portland, that’s almost certainly no fault of Snyder and totally lame of them. But it kind of put a damper on my affection for him, especially when I started coming across totally earnest speeches like this one after offering up his not-quite-girfriend up for a foursome with his two buddies–

You know, when I was a little kid in Oregon, I didn’t feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.

–and I began to imagine that he was the kind of guy that would insist on not using a condom because “it’s just not natural.”

I’m still going to finish the book, it’s entertaining enough and Kerouac is just so stylized and of a time that I think it might be worth my while.

//

When I arrived home after breakfast, I read and watched Natalie candy some jalapeños and said hi to the landlords who stopped by to look at the carpet in the downstairs room that flooded a little bit last night. The smell of hot vinegar was starting to reignite the dying embers of my hangover, so I decided to go out and shop for clothes.

I wasted an hour at Goodwill. I should have remembered that nothing there ever fits me, and in the changing room I realized that it was both true that I had picked out the things I most liked, and that they were all hideous. I changed tacks and drove to Target in Clackamas while I had a long phone conversation with Hannah.

I cooked dinner and listened to the Longform podcast while I ate. I am addicted right now to the theater of creativity, and I worry that it’s yet another upstream stage of what is pretty much consumption. I envy them their projects and passions, and I hope that the fact that I look up to them like I did high school seniors when I was a freshman means that one day I will feel as capable as them.

Worlds Collide

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

I was fascinated by this profile, in The Smart Set of Henry Steel Olcott, the American leader of a Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. It would be hard to find a better example of an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things than Olcott’s life, spanning from antebellum United States:

Henry Steel Olcott began life in 1832 on a farm in Orange, New Jersey, the eldest of six children. His parents were devout Presbyterians who traced their lineage to the Puritans. Olcott would study agricultural science at what is now New York University, and then work in experimental agriculture, publishing several influential studies that gave him international renown. Olcott was a confident man and a modern man, unconventional and independent, excelling at whatever he did, an embodiment of the American ethic. He allied himself with the liberal causes of mid-19th century America: the abolition movement, the women’s movement, the temperance movement, the cremation movement. There is some evidence that a young Olcott dabbled in Spiritualism, a fad at the time. Everyone who knew Olcott thought of him as a man of principle, and also a kook, and maybe a visionary, too. When he tired of agriculture, Olcott decided he would be a journalist, writing for the New York Tribune and a few other papers. Around this time, Olcott married the pious daughter of an Episcopalian minister who bore Olcott two sons. But husband and wife were destined to grow apart, and eventually they divorced, leaving Olcott to explore his more experimental side.

At the onset of the American Civil War, Olcott joined the Union Army and served as the special commissioner of the War Department investigating fraud, corruption, and graft at the New York Mustering and Disbursement Office. By the time he was through, Olcott had achieved the rank of colonel. He became so well respected as a man who could get to the bottom of any injustice, the secretary of war appointed him to investigate the conspiracy behind the Lincoln assassination, which was accomplished in two weeks’ time. At the war’s end, Olcott decided he would leave government service and become a private lawyer specializing in insurance, revenue, and fraud.

and ending as a leader of men:

By the time Olcott died in 1907, it was clear he had played a crucial role as just such a leader. In Sri Lanka, Henry Steel Olcott would create scores of Buddhist schools, and many more would be built in his name. It was Henry Steel Olcott who initiated the design of the international Buddhist flag, and you see it everywhere in Sri Lanka, from temples to trishaws. His Buddhist Catechism has been translated into more than 20 languages and is still used in Buddhist education all over the world. And Olcott has been honored in kind. There are Henry Steel Olcott statues in Sri Lanka, and Henry Steel Olcott streets. There is a Henry Steel Olcott Memorial Cricket Tournament (perhaps the greatest honor Sri Lanka could bestow upon a man) held across the country each year.

In 1967, at a ceremony for the commemorative stamp issued in Sri Lanka to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Olcott’s death, then-Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake summed up Olcott thus: “At a time when Buddhism was on the wane in Ceylon, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott…awakened its people to fight to regain their Buddhist heritage. Colonel Olcott was one of the heroes in the struggle of Lankan independence…. Colonel Olcott’s visit to Ceylon was a landmark in the history of Buddhism.”

On a more personal level, I was intrigued by this tidbit: “At his funeral in India in 1907, his successor as resident of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, told the gathering of mourners that they were not to say goodbye to Colonel Henry Steel Olcott but merely to the cast-off garment that once held his spirit.” It turns out that this woman, Dr. Annie Besant, was one of the founders of Besant Hill School, a competing boarding school located in the town that I attended school in, Ojai, California. Ojai has a long history of strange religious establishment; the school that I attended is located next to a compound run by the followers of Jiddu Krishnamurti.