Home » meditations (Page 17)

Category Archives: meditations

“You Are Here to Risk Your Heart”

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

Not Learned in School

Classroom

Classroom

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

Tuscany on the Pacific

Posted on by
Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

When I first moved to Los Angeles during the last Ice Age, everything that was classy had a French name: The restaurants, the big real estate developments, and so on. Sometime over the last twenty years, suddenly Tuscany became the measure of all things ritzy. Although it is still filled with empty storefronts with “For Lease” signs, I can see the developers trying to turn it into a little Tuscany.

I can’t think of Italian food in Southern California as being so rarefied if for no other reason than it tends to be pretty mediocre. Take meatballs, for instance: If one is a gourmet chef, one doesn’t make meatballs that are nothing but differently-shaped hamburger patties. It is necessary to mince onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs into the ground meat mixture first. Even my Hungarian Mom knew that when she made hamburgers. But in L.A. that never happens.

I remember a huge meatball at a Buca di Beppo in the San Fernando Valley that was nothing but a large hamburger hockey puck.

So I don’t take Los Angeles’s Tuscan dreams with anything but a grain of salt, and perhaps some minced onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs.

The painting above is from the Erin Hill studio website. It’s quite pretty and a steal at $220.00. Maybe my hijacking the JPG file will make you want to buy the painting.

Why I Don’t Text

Posted on by | 1 Comment

One Can Pick and Choose Which Technologies to Adopt

Is it because I’m older than dirt? Hmm, maybe, but it wouldn’t be the exact reason. The real reason is that I faced a major struggle to learn how to speak and write correct English.

It all started at Harvey Rice Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio in January 1951. The school was at that time right in the middle of the largest Hungarian neighborhood in the United States. My parents and great grandmother did not speak English at home, so I was raised speaking Hungarian. (We didn’t have a television set until later.)

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Idell, sent me home with a note pinned to my shirt saying “What language is this child speaking? Is there something wrong with him?” Duh! Mrs. Idell was teaching in the middle of a Hungarian neighborhood and had no idea of what Hungarian sounded like. How 1950s is that!

I wonder whether that was the main reason we moved to the suburbs in 1951 after my brother Dan was born.There, I attended St. Henry Elementary School on Harvard Avenue where I made fairly rapid strides in learning what was for me a new language. Where, in kindergarten, I was thought to be something of a retard, by Fifth Grade and onwards I was getting all As—particularly, I might add, in English. In fact, by the Eighth Grade, I was the only person in my class who could diagram complicated sentences by parts of speech. And I got a scholarship to Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio (now called St. Peter Chanel).

With this background, I do not accept the abbreviations forced on texters, such as OMG, LOL, IMHO, YATFM, and wkewl. My idea of language is not a branch of shorthand: It is a medium for communication that attempts to be exact and even, whenever possible, elegant. I like varying my sentence architecture and even using words that might not be all that common. But I always search for the mot juste. And abbreviations and shorthand don’t qualify. I love Martine dearly, but I will not confuse her by saying 143 to her. Incidentally, it’s not the technology: it’s all the shortcuts I hate. I never even used any smileys in my e-mails, though I was e-mailing before many texters were even born.

At the risk of being thought an old fool (which imputation I will not necessarily dispute), I will continue to eschew technologies that vitiate the hard-won battles of my past life.

 

Run Like Hell: The Holidays Are Here!

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Thanksgiving: Gobble Until You Wobble

The end of the year tends to be something of a blur for me. The holidays come one right after the other, starting with Halloween and continuing with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day. I am of two minds about these holidays. On one hand, I feel I am required to be in a festive mood and follow certain “family” traditions that were, in fact, never a part of my own family. On the other hand, while I appreciate the time off from work, I would rather pick my own holidays and spend the time going someplace interesting, such as Peru, Siberia, American National Parks, or Australia.

Still, for those of you who feel they have to be uplifted by celebrating our holidays in a traditional manner, my heart goes out to you. Just remember that your holidays do not define or delimit you in any way. You are a unique person with needs which other people might at times find off-putting. Never you mind! Just put on a happy face and grit your teeth. But whatever you do, remember to pay homage to your own daemons, once the needs of your loved ones have been taken care of.

I recognize that I am a little strange at times. But so are we all! There is a certain safety in being conventional, but that safety is an illusion. Any day of the year, I would rather read a good book than watch a football game; eat a pork tamale with a fiery salsa picante rather than turkey; give gifts because I want to, not because it is a social obligation.

Tomorrow, Martine and I will go to the Getty Villa to look at ancient Greek and Roman art. We will pointedly not join the throngs at the malls looking for Black Friday bargains. We would rather have a restful Friday looking at works of art which have survived for two or more milllennia that were created by people who were much like us.

 

The Life After Death

Samuel Butler

That there is such a life is as palpable as that there is a life before death. See the influence that the dead have over us. But this life is no more eternal than our present life. Shakespeare and Homer may live long, but they will die, that is to say, become unknown as direct and efficient causes—some day.

Even so God himself dies, for to die is to change and to change is to die to what has gone before. If the units change the total must do so also.

As no one can say which egg or seed shall come to visible life and in its turn leave issue, so no one can say which of the millions of now visible lives shall enter into the afterlife on death, and which have but so little lifeas practically not to count. For most seeds end as seeds or as food for some alien being, and so with lives, by far the greater number are sterile, except in so far as they can be devoured as the food of some stronger life. The Handels and Shakespeares are the few seeds that grow—and even these die.

And the same uncertainty attaches to posthumous life as to pre-lethal. As no one can say how long another shall live, so no one can say how long or how short a reputation shall live. The most unpromising weakly-looking creatures sometimes live to ninety while strong robust men are carried off in their prime. And no one can say what a man shall enter into life for having done. Roughly, there is a sort of moral government whereby those who have done the best work live most enduringly, but it is subject to such exceptions that no one can say whether or no there shall not be an exception in his own case either in his favour or against him.—Samuel Butler, Notebooks

“A Sickly Moment of Dark Surprise”

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Unexpected

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

“Like Beads on a String”

Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Papa Bear Gets It Right

Posted on by | 1 Comment

“Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly

The nickname is from Stephen Colbert, who has occasionally had him on as a guest on his Comedy Central show. In all the media and political verbiage being flung back and forth yesterday, he made probably the most accurate statement of why Obama won last night: “It’s not a traditional America any more…. The White Establishment is now a minority.”

While O’Reilly meant that in the most rueful way possible, it’s what I have been saying for years. The whole Conservative political movement in the United States has been driven by aging Whites, many of whom feel disenfranchised and alienated. They tend to be either rich (a small minority of them), or small businessmen who made it big at one time and are now facing an attrition of their past gains, or poor and wanting to identify with the rich. In any case, they are not young. If they have any children, there’s no guarantee that their children are either numerous or politically in step with their parents.

Even though I am White, I am part of that new America that O’Reilly decries. I am not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP); nor am I Scotch-Irish; nor am I a member of any other demographic cohort that runs with the Right Wing. I am a White Hungarian Renegade Catholic (WHRC) with Black, Latino, and Asian sympathies.

When I used to work with census data at Urban Decision Systems some twenty years ago, I saw the handwriting on the wall for the White political establishment.

The Handwriting on the Wall

Over the next decade or so, most of the Tea Party recidivists will either die out or enter nursing homes. Those who remain will be increasingly irrelevant in the face of a demographic groundswell for those who had, until lately, been lumped together as “minorities.” In Los Angeles, it is the Whites who are in the minority. And, really, it’s not so bad as all that.

It has always been the fate of political establishments to be supplanted. Remember the Irish immigration of the 1830s and 1840s? Then it was the “Yellow Peril” when people feared being replaced by Chinese coolies who were brought in to work on the railroads. Then it was the turn of us Eastern Europeans later in the 19th and early 20th centuries as they arrived to escape political and religious persecution. Then it was the turn of the Mexicans.

Somehow, enough always remains of America to be worthwhile, even if there is a slightly darker shade of skin, an epicanthic fold about the eyes, or broken English. Hell, I didn’t even know the English language existed until I showed up in kindergarten. (That was just before the days of a TV set in every home.)

So yesterday I called it right. I thought Obama would win. And I think we all will win in the long run as a result. Don’t worry about me becoming an embittered Conservative complaining about the relentless tides of change. That’s what life is all about.

 

 

Notes on the Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on by | 1 Comment

What’s With the Zombies Already? No, Wait, That’s Just a Republican!

Until George Romero’s 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead, zombies were simply thought of as Voodoo-reanimated corpses. A good example is the character (if it can be called one) of Carrefour in Val Lewton’s lyrical I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Then, too, there was Victor Halperin’s early White Zombie (1932) starring Bela Lugosi. Also zombies (or was it vampires?) played a role in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend.

But it was Romero who really got the ball rolling and transferred the concept from an African or Haitian context to the general population. And the idea took hold, especially among the young who, perhaps, saw zombies as a metaphor for the breakdown of civilization and, perhaps, the mindlessness of an older generation that won’t let the young get on with their lives.

In any case, now that the Twilight novels of Stephenie Meyer have blunted the whole concept of vampires for young males, it is perhaps natural that they moved on to the zombies as the new thing in horror.

It was only a matter of time before the concept of a zombie apocalypse was born. What happens when the zombies threaten to attack en masse? Even the august Centers for Disease Control (CDC) got into the act by issuing a tongue-in-cheek website entitled Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. Actually, it was a shrewd move because, if you are prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you are prepared for any eventuality.

Looking around me at America today, I see little chance of a zombie apocalypse. I think most Americans—even dead ones—are allergic to brains, whether devouring or even using them for anything more sophisticated than supporting a hat.

Photo credit: I hijacked the above photo from a website entitled You the Designer, which has thirty-seven zombie photos for your amusement and delectation.