enough for any heaven

BEYOND EVEN THIS

Who would have thought
the afterlife would
look so much like Ohio?
A small town place,
thickly settled
among deciduous trees.
I lived for what seemed
a very short time.
Several things did not work out.

Casually almost,
I became another one
of the departed,
but I had never imagined
the tunnel of hot wind that pulls
the newly dead
into the dry Midwest
and plants us like corn. I am

not alone, but I am restless.
There is such sorrow
in these geese, flying over,
trying to find a place to land
in the miles and miles
of parking lots
that once were soft wetlands. They seem

as puzzled as I am
about where to be.
Often they glide,
in what I guess is
a consultation with each other,
getting their bearings,
as I do when
I stare out my window
and count up

what I see. It's not much really:
one buckeye tree,
three white frame houses,
one evergreen,
five piles of yellow leaves.
This is not enough
for any heaven I had dreamed,
but I am taking the long view.

There must be a backcountry
of the beyond,
beyond even this and farther out,
past the dark smoky city
on the shore
of Lake Erie, through the landlocked passages
to the Great Sweetwater Seas.

Maggie Anderson

From A Space Filled with Moving, University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1991 by Maggie Anderson.
(the top image is from here)

solitude

in continuing with my supposition that an important, perhaps the most important, aspect of culture is religion, i wish to begin to look at, for ease's sake, some differ- ences between christianity and buddhism. it's clear that i'm not a scholar on this subject, and i know that some of you are, so please add your knowledge, and please don't judge me too harshly for my inevitable errors.

while both religious traditions have some form of simplicity at heart, both have their garish elements as well. but this will not be a discussion of externals, but rather a discussion of how both deal with the internal reaches of the spirit.

let us look first at solitude, at our percep- tions, and at "realities." when a solitary figure is featured, what is your reaction, and what does that depend on? are different internal processes inferred for a woman than for a man?

i find one of my own internal prejudices in noting that she looks dejected while he looks creative. is the difference in the images or in myself?

while both of these images are by west- erners, one is of a monk in japan by an artist (orlik) who spent much time there. by my perception, i see him as walking in contemplation, while in the other i imagine someone returning home with the groceries, hurrying because of the cold.

why the differences? again, are they inherent in the images or in me?

(though this next might seem like a change of subject, i think this will all tie together in the end.)

so then let us look at the simi- larities in the origins of the two religions. i find it striking how similar these sound.

At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus of Nazareth subjected himself for forty days to physical and spiritual testing in the desert; and the Gospels record other times in which he retired for periods of solitary prayer. In the early church, individuals would live ascetic lives, though usually on the outskirts of civilization. 1

jesus said, "Don't go into fear; don't get overly stuck in the judgmental functioning of the mind; consider the lilies; learn to love your neighbor with the same love as you give yourself; love one another as I have loved you; know the truth, and the truth will set you free; be perfect, just as God is perfect... be still ... and know ...." 2

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” 3

the buddha as well fasted in the desert "at the beginning of his public ministry." the buddhist temples were, and continue to be, on the edges of town.

the buddha said, "Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind." 4

"Consider others as yourself." 5

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." 6

in fact, perhaps the only disagreement in the origins of the beginnings was that in buddhism we are taught to look inward, and in christianity we are taught to look outward, to god. the irony is that both are talking about the same thing.

another difference, in practice, is the reason for that practice. christians' goal is the sweet hereafter. buddhists are more interested in the sweet now.

fascinatingly, there are websites and books galore on all of the parallels between the two men, the two traditions. thai buddhist monk and teacher thich nhat hanh has written and edited several himself. just google jesus and buddha and you will have days of reading at your fingertips.

so it seems that the differences began to occur as christianity began to change in the centuries after christ's death. (i know -- this isn't news -- but it seemed important to mention at this point of the explor- ation.) eventually, churches were moved to the center of town. eventually, wars were fought in christ's name. eventually, people were scorned or banished for any number of "sins" that had developed in those centuries.

these changes never developed in buddhism.

so what of solitude? while buddhism continued its embrace of the practice, christianity became more "community oriented." the practices following the buddha's teachings remained pretty much the same, but the concept of finding god, and truth, and be set free by it has turned, all too often, into an iron-clad institution: find our god, our truth, or we will see to it that you have no freedom.

the externalizing of god, in the west, led to a certainty that god was "out there," which was never what jesus really taught. yes, things are changing. meditation has become in important part of the religious traditions of the west. and there wouldn't be a market for all those books if people were not now recognizing their needs in a new way. but how did the divergence happen, the one that i'm positing is the reason for the divergence in the arts. i'll try to take that on next.

japonisme in the land of the pueblo (etc.) VI

(click images to enlarge)

For a decade or more Winold Reiss dedicated his talents to creating a pictorial epic of the North American Indian which shall preserve the distinctive characteristics of these fast vanishing tribes. The Indians of the Northwest were his favorite subject for research and the large number of portraits and figure compositions in color and in line which he made of the Blackfeet Indians constitutes a veritable saga of the tribe.

Mr. Reiss brought to his task an unusual and paradoxical combination of talents...his interest in racial type and character and his unfailing eye for the decorative aspects of his subjects. Indianologists commended Mr. Reiss's studies of the aborigines for their ethnological accuracy and the knowledge of custom and folklore which they display; and those in search of decorative art which shall also have an authentic American note were very apt to commission Mr. Reiss for the carrying out of their ideas.

It is perhaps another paradox that a painter of German birth should have been a pathfinder in discovering the decorative possibilities of the North American Indian. Mr. Reiss was born in the Black Forest and received his training as an artist with his father, Fritz Reiss, well known genre painter specializing in the peasant types of the Black Forest, and with Franz von Stuck at the Royal Academy in Munich. 1

this story is not without debate nor without sadness, but there's another chapter or two to go through before we get to that.

for now let us just point out clouds and how they had become seen. winold reiss opened an art school in glacier natonal park where he taught tourists and some of the blackfoot indians who were most often their subjects. blue eagle studied with him privately. what the world had begun to incorporate into their design awareness was 'art deco,' and current awareness is the only thing that one can teach.

we can see it above in winold's magazine cover and fred's buffalo hunt, in nc's book cover and in my photo. clouds have always had linings upon occasion, but they were never painted quite like that until they saw the styles of the japanese.

(for some fascinating background, and perspective, check this out.)

the chronicling poet

thanks to the work of a handful of poets, trans- lators, and publishers, we have become aware of a number of poets and novelists, women in early japan. now, though, the voices of the diarists are coming through as well.

in Bettina Gramlich-Oka's fas- cinating essay, Tokugawa Women and Spacing the Self , we are introduced to the lives and work of three such women, Rai Shizuko (or Baishi) (1760-1842), Tadano Makuzu(1763-1825), and Iseki Takako (1785-1844). in excerp- ting (dramatically) the essay, i will let each woman speak for herself.

shizuku:












Omou koto ........................ Without a thought,
nakute mimashiya ........................... for a while, I only
to bakari ni ....................................... observe,
nochi no koyohi zo .................... but later this evening
tsuki ni nakinuru ................... I will shed tears under
the moon. (1800/9/13)

o no naka ni ................... Whatever in the world
michi yori soto wa .................................. lies outside
nanigoto mo ................................ the Way,
supporapon no........................................ throw
pon ni shite oke ........................................ away!

makuzu:

My father Heisuke had five daughters. He wished to marry one of them to a retainer [of the Date house], but none of my sisters said she would go. While they feigned ignorance of our father’s hope, one by one their life courses were decided. I realized that if I did not act, my father’s wish would go unfulfilled, so I set aside my own desires and moved to this place.

Having made up my mind, I resolved to return to my father the body he had given me and, resigning myself to my life being over at the age of thirty-five, set out on a journey of no return. There was little to it, I thought, since it was better than the road to death. Whatever hardships I encountered after arriving here, I endured, thinking them better than the tortures of hell. But ever since [my brother] Motosuke left this world, my mind has not been at ease. I wrote this book [Hitori kangae] thinking that unless I pursued my father’s goals, he would have developed his ideas in vain.

As for half-baked scholars, their thinking is full of errors; the more they gather together, the more they argue without producing wisdom. This is the general situation among scholars. In what way do they differ from frogs?

Since I am a woman lacking in knowledge, I have stated whatever I wanted to without a second thought. Please correct my writings according to your judgment.

I have written this entire text without any sense of modesty or concern about being unduly outspoken…With this in mind, I feel neither pain nor irritation at being criticized by others.

takako:

What I am now writing, with my inadequate intelligence and clumsy brush, is not intended to be broadcasted to the world. I am writing this in order to let the young people of my family and their children in future generations know a little of how our family lives today and what our world is like. No doubt these scraps of paper will become the haunt of bookworms or be dragged off by mice for their nests, but even if that happens, it will make a wonderful diversion. (1840/2/12)