Poetry Day!

It seems that there are periods of transition and unpredictability that bring out the best art, times where the old conventions prove themselves so inadequate that a mere sweep of the hand is enough. At the moment I am reading Will in the World, a very grounded, but speculative, presentation of the forces that made Shakespeare Shakespeare.
There is little or no religion in his writing for good reason: Catholicism and the Church of England were wielded like truncheons, and more than a few intellectuals and poets got the worst of it. Out that era came Marlowe, Smart, and Ben Johnson, and many others. A dangerous time, to be sure, but it was the beginning of contemporary English literature.

Another period of that was the American Civil War, the aftermath of which made the wonderful poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and Longfellow seem crusty and pre-modern, while early early Modernists like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman found their voices.

Perhaps my favorite such period was in France during the resistance to the Nazi Occupation. Suddenly, the Surrealists (a who's who of French art in the 20's and 30's) found their concerns for art and the vitality of inner life vacated by emergency. The nation was absolutely at risk. It was being strangled. And for perhaps the last time in a western democracy, poetry became the central of all arts.

Circulated in secret, the poems of Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard asserted a firm commitment to what is beautiful, noble, and shared, and these simple, at times strange, purely lyric outpourings were on the lips of the men and women who harassed and confused the Nazis and their collaborators. Who were often tortured and murdered for their efforts.

The object of the poet's love was a woman, but that woman became conflated with France itself. French Surealist Poetry of the 40's is that very rare thing, patriotic poetry that is simple and moving, but forces a great and complex moral task on the listener.

This is translated by Samuel Beckett:

Lady Love (Paul Eluard)

She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And make me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say.

Unrelated but...

This morning I read this:

"Obama's new budget plan includes a little-noted sea change in U.S. nuclear policy, and a step towards his vision of a denuclearized world. It provides no funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, created to design a new generation of long-lasting nuclear weapons that don't need to be tested. (The military is worried that a nuclear test moratorium in effect since 1992 might endanger the reliability of an aging US arsenal.) But this spring Obama issued a bold call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and part of that vision entails leading by example. That means halting programs that expand the American nuclear stockpile. For the past two budget years the Democratic Congress has refused to fund the Bush-era program. But Obama's budget kills the National Nuclear Security Administration program once and for all.

"My colleagues just stared at that line," says Joe Cirincione, a longtime nonproliferation expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund. "They had never seen anything like that." Killing the program, he said, was "the first programmatic impact of the new [zero nukes] policy. People have said they want to see more than words, this is the very first action."

In the eighties two issues were of primary concern to me and my politically inclined friends, stopping Reagan's secret wars in Central America and getting rid of nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction was the "official" doctrine of strategic defense for both the Soviets and the U.S. We thought that was completely nuts.

These days, few people under 35 have any idea what living under that spectre was like. It is a distinguishing mark of a certain age cohort. Now that the inhabitants of the 24 hour news cycle are perpetually histrionic over even minor worries, I wonder if the under 35 set can even relate.

Nevertheless, despite quasi-pandemics, global warming, the ocean being fished out, and so on, nuclear weapons are a very real, very human problem. It amazes me to see it being addressed in such a substantive, but low key, manner.

It was, back then, considered to be a crucial step towards a better world. It still is.

Early Alcohol Awareness

A good article in the Times about detecting problematic drinking patterns early on includes this passage:

Dr. Willenbring, who directs the institute’s Division of Treatment and Recovery Research, added: “Once they know who they are, most people at risk of becoming alcohol abusers can cut down on their alcohol consumption and reduce their risk. We know that many heavy drinkers are able to change on their own.”

For those who already drink at abusive levels, the new program can help them acknowledge their problem and seek treatment earlier, before they suffer irreversible medical and social problems like liver or brain disease, legal difficulties, job loss or divorce.

The beauty of Rethinking Drinking is that it can be used in the privacy of the home or in a doctor’s office, sparing people the embarrassment and stigma that often accompany public acknowledgment of a problem with alcohol and entering a treatment program.

This is probably something we should look at for our students at TAS.

A note: My posts have been sparse because May is a jammed packed month. My two boys have baseball four nights a week, TAS is winding up for the end of the year and the beginning of the next, and I've just started another round of classes at grad school. My apologies.

Yukon's visit

What a wonderful presence some people have. Yukon, our monk friend and embassy from the Zen Mountain Monastery was so kind to teach a meditation class and to lead a session for us. Not all his mustard seeds fell on pavement, but rather he brought an everyday dignity and clarity to a practice that some of us take for granted at times. I hope he can visit often and help us create more and more opportunities to for each student to deepen his or her capacities.

Sitting is so simple and so difficult. Climbing a hill can be difficult too. As manic May pulls each of us in a thousand directions, that hill gets steeper and steeper. If all any one of us can do is be aware of what we are doing much of the time- speaking deliberately, walking deliberately, eating deliberately, all will be fine.

It is true.

Right and Left

from Discover Magazine:

Lateralized brains are not unique to humans. Parrots prefer picking up things with their left foot. Toads tend to attack other toads from the right but go after prey from the left. Zebra fish are likely to look at new things with their right eye and familiar things with their left. Even invertebrates are biased. Pinar Letzkus, a vision researcher at Australian National University, rewarded bees with sugar whenever they extended their tongue at the sight of a yellow rectangle on a computer screen. He then fashioned tiny eye patches and put them on a new set of subjects. Bees with their left eye covered learned almost as quickly as did bees without a patch. But bees with their right eye covered did far worse.

The broken symmetry of the nervous system may thus be as old as the symmetry itself. If so, it is an ancient puzzle. Being biased to one side would seem like a serious handicap: A toad that hopped to the left whenever it was startled by a predator, for instance, would be easy prey for an attacker that could anticipate which way it would go; the same holds for any other kind of ingrained behavioral imbalance. A number of scientists have run experiments to find the benefits that might offset such costs.

One hypothesis is that a lateralized brain is more powerful than one that works like a mirror image. Instead of two matching parts of the brain performing an identical task, one can take charge, leaving the other free to do something else.

Special Guest, Special Talk

A guest meditation instructor, the monk Yukon, from the Zen Mountain Monastery, will be joining us from 9 to 10:30 tomorrow. Please join us. All are welcome. There will be instruction, meditation, and a talk.