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A Fragment of the Golden Eternity

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Jack Kerouac spent many years studying the Dharma of Buddhism. It shows up in many of his earlier works, particularly in his The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, from which the following excerpts are taken:

11.

If we were not all the golden eternity we wouldn’t be here. Because we are here we cant help being pure. To tell man to be pure on account of the punishing angel that punishes the bad and the rewarding angel that rewards the good would be like telling the water “Be Wet”—Never the less, all things depend on supreme reality, which is already established as the record of Karma-earned fate.

16.

The point is we’re waiting, not how comfortable we are while waiting. Paleolithic man waited by caves for the realization of why he was there, and hunted; modern men wait in beautiful homes and try to forget death and birth. We’re waiting for the realization that this is the golden eternity.

22.

Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.

I am not sure that Kerouac’s Buddhism is the genuine article, but in a way it doesn’t matter. His questing had its value and brushes against the truth at a wide number of places.

Discharged

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I Was Expecting Something Much More Demanding

If you’ll remember, I was hospitalized in November for two days and a night at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center for losing consciousness in the bathroom in the middle of the night—either from a lack of adrenaline (my pituitary was removed years ago) or low blood pressure. If not, you can read about it in my post entitled “I Dodge a Bullet.”

Although I had been hospitalized for roughly similar reasons three times before, this time I also had an ugly hematoma on my left forehead and a broken eleventh rib.

Apparently, this qualified me for a higher level of care than previously. Also, I am now 78 years old; and the good doctors probably thought I was a shut-in. So I had eight weeks of visits from a nurse, occupational therapist, physical therapist, and even a social worker. The last official visit was today from the physical therapist, a stunningly beautiful young woman from Ecuador.

Back when I was in high school, my mother worked at a Cleveland hospital for the terminally ill. During the summers, I volunteered in the hospital’s physical therapy department—not working with patients, but mainly inventorying and storing the materials used by the therapists. Most of the department’s patients were paraplegics and hemiplegics.

Three times before, I had benefited from physical therapists who had worked with me when I had a hip replacement in 2002 and two separate broken shoulders, one from a fall in Argentina and another (on the other shoulder) closer to home. As a result, I have always respected the profession.

The home visits from the therapist sent by UCLA were likewise helpful to me. The balls of my feet have for several years been tingling from diabetic neuropathy. The exercises the therapist had me do were relatively simple, but have mitigated the neuropathy to some extent. That’s good, because I remember one of my former physicians had the same problem and had to retire when they had to amputate his feet, which exhibited a severe case of neuropathy.

So I have now been discharged from the home visits, which have been extremely helpful in transitioning me to what is to come.

Januarius/Gennaro

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The Dried Blood of St Januarius (AKA San Gennaro)

He is the patron saint of Naples. At the church named for him, the dried blood of Saint Januarius (or Gennaro) is supposed to liquefy three times a year:

  • September 19, the saint’s feast day
  • December 16
  • The first Saturday in May

When the miracle fails to occur, it portends “imminent disaster including war, famine or disease,” according to one website. Apparently, the miracle occurred again in September, but I have not been able to find whether the December 16 miracle occurred on schedule.

Januarius was a third century bishop of Benevento, Italy, who was martyred during the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian.

For a number of years, I have pre-empted the name of Januarius to refer to my practice of using the first month of the year to read only authors I have never read before. My reasoning for this is to constantly broaden my horizons. For example, this year I plan to read several Cuban novels.

One result of my Januarius project is also that I read more women authors, which I had not done so much heretofore.

I will report back to you probably in early February if I have made any finds worth noting. (I probably will.)

The Parts of 2023 I’d Gladly Jettison

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In the Biz Bag With Him and His Followers!

Looking back over the past year, there are a lot of persons, places, and phenomena I would gladly not have to confront in 2024—indeed, ever again.

First and foremost is America’s mumbling incompetent dictator-in-waiting. Currently, he is attempting to turn the death of a thousand cuts in court into victories. They aren’t and never will be. That goes for all his minions, those drooling red-hatted loons seated behind him at his rallies.

Mega-Billionaires, especially those in the tech sector, who want to enrich themselves by making everyone else miserable with their social media or artificial intelligence.

Time to shitcan crypto-currency once and for all. A form of anonymous, unregulated currency, it is of use only to evil dark web goons.

Quasi-celebrity influencers who foment flash mobs and twonky fashions. Like Paris Hilton, who in today’s issue of the Los Angeles Times is quoted as saying: “I also like butter and strawberry jelly on toast, then sometimes toasted bagels with strawberry cream cheese, which I’m like obsessed with.” If you come across something of that ilk in this blog, you are justified in disemboweling me.

And that’s only the beginning, but space is limited and I want to get to bed before midnight. I wish for you and yours a tolerable New Year. (Let’s not kid ourselves.)

Barrancas del Cobre

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One of Many Tunnels on the Copper Canyon Route

It has been almost forty years since i took the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico (now known as El Chepe) from Los Mochis in Sinaloa to Divisadero high in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It was one of the most fantastic train rides of my life, going where there are no roads other than a single track between Chihuahua and Los Mochis.

American engineers were consulted by the Mexican government to map out a rail route over the Sierra Madre Occidental, but they came back and said it just wasn’t feasible. So Mexican engineers went and built it anyway, all the way from Constitutión across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas, to the port of Topolobambo on the Sea of Cortez. Now the train runs a shorter route, but it includes 100% of the fantastic mountain scenery.

I went only as far as Divisadero, where at the time a lone motel stood next to the edge of a junction of three canyons, each of which was reputedly as deep as Arizona’s Grand Canyon. And there wasn’t just Copper Canyon, but altogether six canyons along the route.

One Slip and You’re Toast

Standing at the edge by Divisadero, I was amazed to see eagles flying over a thousand feet below me.

Altogether I spent two nights at Divisadero, and on the return trip spent a night at Bahuichivo. That was only the beginning of a long trip which included Mazatlán, Durango, Guanajuáto, Querétaro, Patzcuaro, Uruapán, Guadalupe, and Puerto Vallarta. As I recall, I was traveling around by bus and train for a whole month on that trip.

A Stiff Neck for Christmas

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Some people talk about the wonderful gifts they got for Christmas. Me, I woke up on Christmas morning with a stiff neck. For the last three days, it has constantly reminded me of its presence, especially when I am turning my neck while driving.

I probably should have been applying heat or ice packs to the neck, but for some reason I didn’t. Now i find that this has benefits mainly in the first two days of the neck pains. I guess I’ll just have to exercise my neck through the twinges and maybe take some Ibuprofen.

Most likely (I hope), the whole thing will disappear within a few days.

Now if only my Niagara of a sinus would do the same!

A Poem for Boxing Day

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The period between Christmas and New Years Day has always been strange. Even among the ancient Mayans, the last five days of the 365-day Haab calendar were called Uayeb, just to fill out the remainder of the year after the 18 months of 20 days each had transpired.

In much of the English-speaking world—but not the United States—today is Boxing Day. It has nothing to do with pugilism and is more a commemoration of certain Victorian practices regarding gifting servants.

It’s also Kwanzaa, a made-up holiday for African-Americans to celebrate their origins and serve as an alternative to that White persons’ holiday known as Christmas.

I was delighted to find a Scottish poem that also celebrates (or debunks) this period. It is “The Daft Days” by Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), written in a broad Scots dialect:

The Daft Days

Now mirk December’s dowie face
Glowrs owr the rigs wi sour grimace,
While, thro’ his minimum of space,
The bleer-ey’d sun,
Wi blinkin light and stealing pace,
His race doth run.

From naked groves nae birdie sings,
To shepherd’s pipe nae hillock rings,
The breeze nae od’rous flavour brings
From Borean cave,
And dwyning nature droops her wings,
Wi visage grave.

Mankind but scanty pleasure glean
Frae snawy hill or barren plain,
Whan winter, ‘midst his nipping train,
Wi frozen spear,
Sends drift owr a’ his bleak domain,
And guides the weir.

Auld Reikie! thou’rt the canty hole,
A bield for many caldrife soul,
Wha snugly at thine ingle loll,
Baith warm and couth,
While round they gar the bicker roll
To weet their mouth.

When merry Yule-day comes, I trou,
You’ll scantlins find a hungry mou;
Sma are our cares, our stamacks fou
O’ gusty gear,
And kickshaws, strangers to our view,
Sin fairn-year.

Ye browster wives, now busk ye braw,
And fling your sorrows far awa;
Then come and gie’s the tither blaw
Of reaming ale,
Mair precious than the well of Spa,
Our hearts to heal.

Then, tho’ at odds wi a’ the warl’,
Amang oursels we’ll never quarrel;
Tho’ Discord gie a canker’d snarl
To spoil our glee,
As lang’s there’s pith into the barrel
We’ll drink and ‘gree.

Fidlers, your pins in temper fix,
And roset weel your fiddle-sticks;
But banish vile Italian tricks
Frae out your quorum,
Not fortes wi pianos mix –
Gie’s Tulloch Gorum.

For nought can cheer the heart sae weel
As can a canty Highland reel;
It even vivifies the heel
To skip and dance:
Lifeless is he wha canna feel
Its influence.

Let mirth abound, let social cheer
Invest the dawning of the year;
Let blithesome innocence appear
To crown our joy;
Nor envy wi sarcastic sneer
Our bliss destroy.

And thou, great god of Aqua Vitae!
Wha sways the empire of this city,
When fou we’re sometimes capernoity,
Be thou prepar’d
To hedge us frae that black banditti,
The City Guard.

I’m Back

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Angels at the Grier-Musser Museum

My computer was down last week, so I was consequently unable to post. It’s been patched up for now, and a new computer is on order. After all, I’ve had this Dell Optiplex 9010 for ten years, so it’s about time to replace it.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all my readers. Oh, and I think I’ll also add a “bah humbug!” for good measure.

The Man With the Hyperactive Head

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My dentist always twits me about my chewing my teeth into oblivion. I do not think I grind my teeth at night, but she thinks I do. And there are the ruined sites of three of my long lost upper teeth. two bicuspids and a molar. She also thinks I live on a diet of jalapeño chile peppers.

In truth, there is something violent about my visage. Take my sneezes: They are so powerful that I have to be prepared to go to the bathroom after a sneezing fit. I find facial tissues to be useless, as I tend to blow them to smithereens. Like my father, I frequently rupture a capillary when I erupt. In my case, it’s usually in my left nostril.

Then there are my sinuses. Whenever there is a major change in the weather (which in L.A. means just about always), I turn into mucus man. I frequently wake Martine up with my snorting, sneezing, and nose-blowing. As she has a tendency to be insomniac, she usually requests that I transfer my drainage to the couch in the living room.

Then, too, my eyelids are constantly irritated with blepharitis. In certain times of the year, usually winter, spring, summer, and fall, my eyelids itch and generate an annoying discharge.

What’s next for me? Great gobs of earwax sticking out of my ears? Saliva that roars like a waterfall? Is my head just too damned loud?

The Blind Librarian

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Argentinian Writer and Poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Just as he was descending into blindness, Jorge Luis Borges was appointed director of the Argentine National Library. He wrote a poem about how he, as a lifelong bibliophile, felt about being in charge of so many books he could no longer read. In the last stanza, he mentions Paul Groussac, a previous director of the Library in the 1920s, who was also blind and, like Borges, also a distinguished writer.

Poem About Gifts

Let none think I by tear or reproach make light
Of this manifesting the mastery
Of God, who with excelling irony
Gives me at once both books and night.

In this city of books he made these eyes
The sightless rulers who can only read,
In libraries of dreams, the pointless
Paragraphs each new dawn offers

To awakened care. In vain the day
Squanders on them its infinite books,
As difficult as the difficult scripts
That perished in Alexandria.

An old Greek story tells how some king died
Of hunger and thirst, though proffered springs and fruits;
My bearings lost, I trudge from side to side
Of this lofty, long blind library.

The walls present, but uselessly,
Encyclopedia, atlas, Orient
And the West, all centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos, and cosmogonies.

Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.

Something that surely cannot be called
Mere chance must rule these things;
Some other man has met this doom
On other days of many books and the dark.

As I walk through the slow galleries
I grow to feel with a kind of holy dread
That I am that other, I am the dead,
And the steps I make are also his.

Which of us two is writing now these lines
About a plural I and a single gloom?
What does it matter what word is my name
If the curse is indivisibly the same?

Groussac or Borges, I gaze at this beloved
World that grows more shapeless, and its light
Dies down into a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and the oblivion of night.