And, here my piece in Sacramento Homeless about the wave of stories about the Sacramento homeless in Big Media and beyond.
UPDATE: And here, another Today Show segment, a follow-up the next day, an objectivity-be-gone love smooch to Sacramento Loaves & Fishes. Sister Libby Fernandez, CEO of L&F, can be heard, as can the city's major, Kevin Johnson. My good friend T-Bone [aka, New York], as nice a fellow as there is in the world, has a cameo role; he's in the food line, asked by Libby (off camera) what he's doing today. "Going to work, today" he says.
Recently the most-excellent Paul Griffin, who writes as miliman for the amazing blog One City, put up a couple of posts relating to Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man" that grabbed my interest.
In the first post, on 2/27, "Emptiness and Wallace Stevens" Paul presents the poem and then walks us through it, splendidly showing how it relates to Buddhism's take on emptiness and how it mostly doesn't relate to existential nothingness. The nil/nothing/emptiness concepts are rather difficult for we Westerners who are completely wrapped in modernity [mostly a good thing], rather full of our self, and filled with ideas of filling our lives with stuff and accomplishment while fleeing boredom and fleeing being quiet or alone with ourself.
I don't have any great argument with Paul's understanding of the poem and his insights, but I'm inspired to walk through the poem, myself, sharing an understanding I come away from it with, completely ignorant of the voracious study of this famous poem I had never before heard of.
Here, first, the short poem and, then, Wallace Stevens reading it in a viddy:
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I, likely, have gone totally fruit loops, but from my listening, Wallace is talking about crossing the bridge of pantheism.
Perhaps foundational is whatever a reader makes of the idea of winter [or cold], so prominent in the poem.
Paul writes, quoting essayist Pat Righelato, "One must have a cold, precise, disciplined mind: this imperative is the poem’s subject."
I think the central idea in the poem is not about "the cold," per se, or even mind, and certainly not one that is precise and disciplined, but being open and available to whatever is there -- even if it is, on first encounter, something alien and harsh.
The poem is about traveling the bridge to what's other. One must have a mind of winter to regard winter, to understand winter, to be winter. If this had been a poem of summer, then a mind of summer would have been what was necessary. It's not about the cold, except that surmounting the challenge of being the other can seem difficult.
We must lose our self to conjoin an other's experience. The seeming irony is that that other is likely to be only fully us! So, the nothing, if we fully lose our self, is the self-same nothing that we encounter in an other. Eureka!
Thus, in the end, I fully agree with Paul (I think.). Here, Nishitani from Religion and Nothingness:
It has often been pointed out that the subjectivity of the ego resolutely refuses to be viewed objectively. And yet, the self shows a constant tendency to comprehend itself representationally as some “thing” that is called “I.” This tendency is inherent in the very essence of the ego as self-consciousness. Therefore it marks a great step forward when the standpoint of Existenz-in-ecstasy, held suspended in nothingness, appears as a standpoint of truly subjective self-existence. Nonetheless, traces of the representation of nothingness as the positing of some “thing” that is nothingness are still to be seen here. The standpoint of sunyata, however, is absolutely nonobjectifiable, since it transcends this subjectivistic nihility to a point more on the near side than the subjectivity of existential nihilism.
As a valley unfathomably deep may be imagined set within an endless expanse of sky, so it is with nihility and emptiness. But the sky we have in mind here is more than the vault above that spreads out far and wide over the valley below. It is a cosmic sky enveloping the earth and man and the countless legions of stars that move and have their being within it. It lies beneath the ground we tread, its bottom reaching beneath the valley’s bottom. If the place where the omnipresent God resides be called heaven, then heaven would also have to reach beneath the bottomless pit of hell: heaven would be an abyss for hell. This is the sense in which emptiness is an abyss for the abyss of nihility.
… even in Buddhism, where we find the standpoint of emptiness expounded, a transcendence to the far side, or the “yonder shore,” is spoken of. But this yonder shore may be called an absolute near side in the sense that it has gone beyond the usual opposition of the near and the far. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of Buddhism consists in its being the religion of the absolute near side.
This, for me, is the most-right, pithiest statement I've read about how to get the American economy on-course. [And note that I'm not saying "back on course." America has been off-course for a long, long time.] It's from an article in Truth is Contageous called "Kiss the Banks Goodbye," posted yesterday:
Restoring the American economy is not going to be a matter of simply jump-starting consumer spending, or even business investment. It’s going to take a long, hard, focused effort to move away from a parasitic consumer economy in which profits are largely made through speculation, and towards a real economy that actually makes things that people both here and around the world need.
In the Slate article about the book about the blog, Plotz tells us a bit about his amazing experience: "After spending a year with the good book, I've become a full-on Bible thumper. Everyone should read it—all of it! In fact, the less you believe, the more you should read." A pretty keen, if not wildeyed, endorsement, eh? Probably should stamp those words on the cover of the Good Book to assure that heathens like me pick it up and give it a careful, judicious read.
But Plotz isn't all-out enthusiastic as his words above imply. Indeed, he doesn't really come away thinking all that much of God by the time he finishes the Old Testament. The viddie, below gives you four minutes of Plotz talking about the Bible -- most specifically, about the story of Dinah [pronounced Deena] from the book of Genesis.
Further, here is Plotz's conclusion about his reading experience,
I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.
After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.
When I complain to religious friends about how much He dismays me, I usually get one of two responses. Christians say: Well, yes, but this is all setup for the New Testament. Reading only the Old Testament is like leaving halfway through the movie. I'm missing all the redemption. If I want to find the grace and forgiveness and wonder, I have to read and believe in the story of Jesus Christ, which explains and redeems all.
But that doesn't work for me. I'm a Jew. I don't, and can't, believe that Christ died for my sins. And even if he did, I still don't think that would wash away God's crimes in the Old Testament.
The second response tends to come from Jews, who razz me for missing the chief lesson of the Hebrew Bible, which is that we can't hope to understand the ways of God. If He seems cruel or petty, that's because we can't fathom His plan for us. But I'm not buying that, either.
If God made me, He made me rational and quizzical. He has given me the tools to think about Him. So I must submit Him to rational and moral inquiry. And He fails that examination. Why would anyone want to be ruled by a God who's so unmerciful, unjust, unforgiving, and unloving?
