Old songs and Strong Men

Above, the man of your dreams?  More about that in a minute.

Below, a sweet song I may have heard when I was six and Vaughan Monroe's version hit the top 10. I loved the narrative - a story in song, a message in persisting through the desert.  Keep a-movin' Dan.   I'm not alone in liking it - a lot of people have recorded it.  I landed on this version first, remembering Johnny Ray, and like it. 


While in that area on YouTube, I saw this and listened to it and looked at it, remembering clearly the movie.  Watching it, many stills from the well-done black-and-white film, I remembered the rigid gender roles in the culture I was born into; the patriarchy - the fundamental culture of the fifties.



I was probably about twelve when "High Noon" came to the Lyn Theatre half a mile from our house.  I was never into "cowboy movies" and thought pretty much nothing happened in it, and it was boring; you could fit about ten of it into one episode of 24 Hours. But I stayed and watched it, of course.  It was a long time until I learned you could walk out on a movie, and then it took me a while to do it.  So there I sat, absorbing the world in which men were interesting and brave and important, and women were . . . pretty. The men did stuff and the women . . . waited. Sigh.

It's been a long, strange trip since then, and most of it hasn't gone as we feminists hoped it would.  Keep a-moving, Jan.  And Susan and Heather and Tiffany, all of us.

I had a second bad fall two weeks ago, and have seen three doctors since then and had an MRI of my brain. Ischemic events happening there, so now I'm scheduled for a neurologist.  I'm tired.  So I'm going to ask you readers to comment, or e-mail me if this strikes any chords with you.  Or reminds you of the stories you grew up with.

The best body you'll ever have

My desk - this is not a collage, yet

I follow a hilarious blogger named Karen who today told us of her adventures with a new exercise program, all in search of The Best Body You'll Ever Have. This is the way you get when you turn forty.

Well, this inspired me to comment on her blog, but my comment magically disappeared, due to the fact that I do not have the best mind I've ever had, for I am an unbelievable 29 years older than Karen, though no wiser, and am, in fact, old enough to be her grandmother.  Possibly.

And here's what I had to say:  at this moment you have a body that works.  And, I know how you feel.  I remember this moment well, standing in front of a mirror in the dark little half-bath in my apartment, seeing that I could no longer feel terrific in these expensive blush-pink pants I had, that went with a beautiful print shirt.  I was not a vision of spring but a middle-aged woman in need of a new fashion statement.

Things had happened to my parts while I wasn't paying attention.  Though I weighed almost what I had in high school, it had redistributed itself here and there.  My shoulders were still perfect, they're the last thing to go.  That was about it, in terms of the visuals. In terms of anything that counted, I had a great body.

When I turned forty, my heart had never gone into fibrillation.  My thyroid worked fine without lumps or assistance. I had never broken a bone or torn a rotator cuff. My hearing was perfect, my kidneys worked - and not for a moment did I consider this a miracle of perfect health.  I considered instead those sort of lumps on the outside of my thighs, which have always spent most of their time in a chair.  I considered breasts that did not tempt me to go braless ever again.  I saw that my stomach was rounder.  And under my chin . . .

Not a one of these revisions to my body affected the way it worked or the way I lived.  I could sleep at night, did I mention that?  I could easily get up off the floor anytime I wanted. I could walk three miles every morning, which I did, grimly, trying to be young again.  What was I thinking?

I don't blame myself.  After all, I was thinking like my mother before me, like everything I'd learned growing up, and saw in the culture. My not-so-perfect mind was stuffed full of concepts about my worth and identity that had nothing to do with reality, and less to do with happiness. This stuff is hard to crack, but if you get to live long enough, you start to get it - reality, I mean.

As for today's body---it still works, just more slowly.  It can walk unaided.  It can drive, eat, talk, type.  Sometimes it frustrates me, but I try to be nice to it---it's the best body I'll ever have.

Men, women, and giving

I often think of the real (though, of course, general) differences between men and women, and of how urgently we need to elevate the qualities of the feminine. One of those is not making war. Another is nurturing, feeding others, which I think is a feminine quality that goes deeper than socially conditioned roles. Today, a little story in The Urban Dharma Newsletter in my mailbox struck me as almost amusing, because it illustrates the difference, though not to say anything about the sexes. It is making a larger point about how scrupulous piety is no substitute for authentic compassion. Here it is, in my words.

The Bhagavata Purana tells of a time when Krishna's hungry friends ask him to feed them. Krishna tells them, "Go to the nearby temple, where the learned Brahmins are performing an elaborate ritual to attain heaven. Tell them I sent you, and ask them for some cooked rice."

The young men go, bow deeply to the priests and say, "Venerable saints, we are the servants of Lord Krishna. He is hungry and has asked us to seek food from you."

The Brahmins are busy. This is like interrupting Sunday morning service in the middle of the sermon. It isn't done.

Anyway, they are important people, and their lives are scheduled, meditation at certain hours, study at other times, purification rituals. They brush the young followers off. Maybe one of them says, "Come back when we're open. We only do food between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. And go around to the back door." Something like that. I don't know whether these young men are homeless, but if they're hungry, they clearly aren't of the same class.

They go back and tell Krishna what happened. He is not surprised. This whole thing is meant to be instructive. He tells them, "Now go to the same men's wives and ask them."

Maybe the young followers are somewhat dubious by now, but you do what the boss tells you. They go to the women. This time their story is, "Lord Krishna is in the neighborhood, and he told us to ask you for food for our hungry group." [So it's like I'm raising money for my high school band.]

When they hear this, the women drop everything, gather huge bowlfuls of the best food in the house, and rush "like rivers towards the ocean" to Krishna, glad to have a chance to give, their hearts full.

Here ends this part of the story. Now, don't anybody call me a femininazi. I didn't make it up. And in any case, bless Christmas. Whatever else is wrong with our holidays, in this season we are sometimes moved to give from a genuine surge of generosity and compassion.

OMG, vampire phenomenon totally explained

I did not spend 23 years getting educated without learning how to talk about books I won't read and movies I refuse to see. The latest such movie is Twilight, which has not only teen-age girls, but some Moms (as distinguished from Mothers) lining up at midnight in matching tee-shirts and squealing with glee when the clerk takes the tarp off the stack of novels.

What is surprising about this? The vampire novels of Anne Rice have been solid bestsellers for many years. In general, the vampire myth falls in line with the romance novel: an innocent girl is swept away by the allure of a clearly dangerous guy. Recognize Wuthering Heights? An anthropologist studying the culture would suggest that these stories mirror the submission expected of women, and make it much more glamorous than actual ordinary oppression and domestic abuse.

It gets worse. These stories train girls to see masochism (danger, getting hurt) as sexy. I really recommend your kids stick with Harry Potter. Or is that old economy? The question unfolds another line of enquiry -- is this phenomenon in some oblique way actually about what the wealthy have done to the rest of us?

The picture (from the film) suggests that he is longing to see her bare neck. Maybe the neck (modestly concealed) will be the next erotic zone. A refreshing idea. I, for one, have lots of scarves.

What passes for the new

I like to have poetry in my head. Recently I am working on memorizing the end of Dr. William Carlos Williams' long poem, Asphodel. I don't know how to get it to format it here the way he did, but you can find the whole thing on poets.org.

Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

You can't open a paper today without realizing that it is September 11. In the NY Times, one stately, blank ad after another pays homage to the day we could have learned something.

We could have learned---did know for at least a few minutes that morning---how very fragile our lives are, how open to interruption, and how vulnerable civilization itself is to men who feed that wolf of hatred inside themselves. We could have learned that American arrogance is an affront to desperate, hungry people.

As a nation, we refused to learn that, but responded with a crazy attempt to put up some huge memorial that could only invite more hatred. With a "war on terror," always with a war.

Buddhists talk about the trio of behaviors that get us in trouble: greed, hatred, and ignorance. They are really almost never three separate things. I know my friends understand how much war is connected with the greed of the wealthy patrons of the greedy politician, how racial hatred rests on ignorance of our true similarity and connectedness as organic life on this planet.

Compared to the devastation wrought by simple-minded boys getting the fun idea of running a passenger jet into the twin towers, you would suppose a $925 Blahnik shoe, shown here, is well, just fun. Bergdorf Goodman has had over 100 requests for this shoe since Carrie Bradshaw wore it in "Sex and the City." Mr. Blahnik may feel he has absolved himself of the responsibility for for creating and selling a product like this by commenting "That's quite obscene."

I suppose that spending so much money on a shoe falls roughly under the canopy of "ignorance," or delusion. Women who do that mistakenly believe it will make them more desirable, and that will make them happy. They believe their bodies are impervious to the strain and misalignment of such a high heel, the shock through the spine with every step. Maybe they believe that money spent through a credit card isn't really money, that you don't have to earn money. I suspect some of those consumers believe that somehow, someday they will be able to pay off their credit cards. That the bill won't come due. We believe we can get away with things, somehow.

But, as Jack Kornfield reported in one talk, a student explained karma like this: "You don't get away with nothing."

What passes for the new is same old. Same old delusion, same old aggression, same old silly concentration on things, same old us vs. them nationalism. You can read about these follies in any scripture, or just read the actual news. It is out there in reality, and in poems.

THE WOMEN'S FAULT!!!

Checking out some of the Blogissatva 2007 Awards, I became more and more hopeful of finding a woman among them. So it was that on "Progressive Buddhism" (Best new blog 2007) I clicked on a long, post titled "Women, Buddhism and the Internet" by Tom Armstrong.

He comments accurately, "Both the oceanic blogosphere . . . and Buddhist webspaces, generally, are in overwhelming proportion managed, written and visited by males." With reference to a Pew report, he explains that this way and that -- you can read it. He includes an interesting paragraph on great women buddhobloggers who have quit (and by the way, the last post on this site is dated July 7), and regrets the loss.

Then he lost me by saying "In one sense it seems that the problem is clearly THE WOMEN'S FAULT!!!" I don't know what I like best, the caps or the three exclamation points. Or maybe the adjectives in the next paragraph: "Similarly, some snarling complaints that meatspace sanghas are overrun my [sic] old white men are specious." So often, language betrays us.

No, what I liked most of all was not the above, but the memory it brought forth. Just a few years ago my father-in-law sat at my dining room table and told us a very long, detailed, carefully crafted story of a long-ago effort in his small town to give opportunity to "the blacks" through the schools. It ended with the statement, delivered in a sort of holy hush: "And you know---they wouldn't take the opportunity." The rising voice explained, "They had every chance." And on it went. Being wise in the ways of racists, I just cleared the table.

I hang around with other educated women, and I notice it is true that they aren't blogging or reading this kind of thing. Their Buddhist activity is not about talking, but about bringing homemade soup or sunflowers when you're sick, about thank-you cards and watching each other's cat. Bodhissatva work.

They have all had to listen to plenty of long, windy male explanations of everything in their life, and some still do, from fathers and husbands and bosses. In particular, these women would not like to be told that the significant wage gap and the heavy glass ceiling that closes off top jobs is All Our Fault. My friends are responsible and intelligent, and would love to earn as much as men do, especially the women who have ended up raising and supporting their children, and sometimes their grandchildren, alone.

They don't like to debate and discuss, either, and would probably consider arguing with this guy useless, like some other male amusements, such as war.