The Death of La Nan M.

When she could no longer
prepare mash for the chickens
or peel potatoes
for the soup
she lost her appetite
even for bread
and scarcely ate

He was painting himself
black on the branches
to watch the crows
who no longer flew high
but kept to the earth

Smaller than the stove
she sat by the window
where outside the leeks grow

By the wood stack
- the hillsides of brushwood
she had carried on her back -
he crouched and became
the chopping block

Her daughter-in-law
fed the chickens
put wood in the stove

At night he reclined on each side
of the burning black fire
burning her bed
What she asked him was his opposite?
Milk he answered with appetite

Lining the kitchen
family and neighbours followed
her fight for breath

High up on the mountain
he pissed on snow and ice
to melt the stream

She found it easier if
she laid her head
on the arm of the chair

His urine was the shape
of an icicle
and as colourless

In her hand
she held a handkerchief
to dab her mouth
when it needed wiping

On his black mirror
there was never breath

The guests as they left
kissed the crown of her head
and she knew them
by their voices

He trundled out a barrow
overturned it
on the frozen dungheap
its two legs still warm

The seventy-third anniversary
of her marriage night
she spent
huddled in the kitchen
from time to time calling her son
she called him by his surname
who rocked on his slippered feet
like a bear

One mistake you made
Death did not joke like a drunk
You should not have grown old

I was not a thief she replied

Dead she looked as tall
laid out on her bed
in dress and boots
as when a bride
but her right shoulder
was lower than the left
on account of all
she had carried

At her funeral
the village saw the soft snow
bury her
before the gravedigger

from "Pig Earth", John Berger 1979

If you go to Asia

If you go to Asia and visit a wat (Thailand) or gompa (Tibet), you will enter something that looks very much like an abbey, a church, or cathedral, being run by people who look like monks or priests, displaying objects that look like icons, which are enshrined in alcoves that look like chapels and revered by people who look like worshippers.

If you talk to one of the people who look like monks, you will learn that he has a view of the world that seems very much like a belief system, revealed a long time ago by someone else who is revered like a god, after whose death saintly individuals have interpreted the revelations in ways like theology. There have been schisms and reforms, and these have given rise to institutions that are just like churches.

Buddhism, it would seem, is a religion.

But is it?

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When asked what he was doing the Buddha replied that he taught "anguish and the ending of anguish." When asked about metaphysics (the origin and end of the universe, the identity or difference of body and mind, his existence or non-existence after death), he remained silent. He said the dharma was permeated by a single taste: freedom. He made no claims to uniqueness or divinity and did not have recourse to a term we would translate as "God."

Gautama encouraged a life that steered a middle course between indulgence and mortification. He described himself as an openhanded teacher without an esoteric doctrine reserved for an elite. Before he died he refused to appoint a successor, remarking that people should be responsible for their own freedom. Dharma practice would suffice as their guide.

This existential, therapeutic, and liberating agnosticism was articulated in the language of Gautama's place and time: the dynamic cultures of the Gangetic basin in the sixth century B.C.E. A radical critic of many deeply held views of his times, he was nonetheless a creature of those times. The axioms that he foresaw as lasting long after his death were refracted through the symbols, metaphors and imagery of his world.

Religious elements, such as worship of the Buddha's person and uncritical acceptance of his teachings, were doubtless present even in the first communities that formed around Gautama. Even if for five hundred years after his death his followers resisted the temptation to represent him as a quasi-divine figure, they eventually did so. Asa the dharma was challenged by other systems of thought in its homeland and spread abroad into foreign cultures such as China, ideas that had been part of the worldview of sixth-century-B.C.E. India became hardened into dogmas. It was not long before a self-respecting Buddhist would be expected to hold (and defend) opinions about he origin and end of the universe, whether the body and mind were identical or different, and the fate of the Buddha after death.

"Buddhism Without Beliefs", Stephen Bachelor, 1997

When they first worked together

When they first worked together, Fetyukov had tried throwing his weight around and shouting at the captain. But the captain had smacked him in the teeth, and they called it quits.

Some of the men were sidling up to the stove with the sand on it, hoping for warmth, but the foreman warned them off.

"I'll warm one or two of you with my fist in a minute! Get the place fixed up first!"

One look at the whip is enough for a beaten dog! The cold was fierce, but the foreman was fiercer. The men went back to their jobs.

Shukov heard the foreman speak quietly to Pavlo: "You hang on here and keep a tight hold on things. I've got to go and see about the percentages."

More depends on the percentages than the work itself. A foreman with any brains concentrates more on the percentages than on the work. It's the percentage that feeds us. Make it look as if the work's done, whether it is or not. If the rate for the job is low, wangle things so that it turns out higher. That's what a foreman needs a big brain for. And an understanding with the norm setters. The norm setters have their hands out, too.

Just think, though - who benefits from all this overfulfillment of norms? The camp does. The camp rakes in thousands extra from a building job and awards prizes to its lieutenants. To Volkovoy, say, for that whip of his. All you'll get is an extra two hundred grams of bread in the evening. But your life can depend on those two hundred grams. Two-hundred-gram portions built the Belomor Canal.

Two buckets of water had been brought in, but they'd iced over on the way. Pavlo decided that there was no point in fetching any more. Quicker to melt snow on the spot. They stood the buckets on the stove.

Gopchik, who had pinched some new aluminum wire, the sort electricians use, had something to say: "Hey, Ivan Denisovich! Here's some good wire for spoons. Will you show me how to mold one?"

Ivan Denisovich was fond of Gopchik, the rascal (his own son had died when he was little, and he had two grownup daughters at home). Gopchik had been jailed for taking milk to Ukrainian guerrillas hiding in the forest. They'd given him a grownup's sentence. He fussed around the prisoners like a sloppy little calf. But he was crafty enough: kept his parcels to himself. You sometimes heard him munching in the middle of the night.

Well, there wouldn't have been enough to go around.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1978, translation H.T. Willetts

I fell into a sickly sleep

I fell into a sickly sleep. All night long, nightmares and disagreeable dreams followed one another; they left me completely exhausted. I woke up sicker than ever. I recalled what I had just dreamed: on entering a large room, I found myself in front of a four-poster canopy bed - a kind of wheelless hearse. This bed, or hearse, was surrounded by a certain number of men and women; the same, apparently, as my companions of the previous evening. The vast room was no doubt a theater, and these men and women were actors or perhaps directors of a production so extraordinary that I was filled with anxiety as I waited...I myself was to one side, in the shelter of a kind of bare, dilapidated corridor: its relation to the room with the bed in it was like that of orchestra seats to the floor of a stage. The forthcoming entertainment was evidently upsetting and full of outrageous humor: we were expecting a real corpse to appear. At that point I noticed a coffin resting in the middle of the four-poster. The plank covering it disappeared, gliding back as noiselessly as a theatre curtain or the lid of a chess set; but what was revealed was not horrible. The corpse was an object of indefinable shape - pink wax of dazzling freshness. The wax recalled the blonde girl's doll whose feet had been cut off. What could be more delectable? It suited the sardonic, quietly delighted attitude of those present. A cruel and agreeable joke had just been played on some victim as yet unknown. Soon afterward, the pink object, which was both disturbing and appealing, grew considerably larger; it took on the appearance of a gigantic corpse carved in marble, with veins of pink or of yellow ocher. The head of the corpse was a huge mare's skull; its body was either a fishbone or an enormous jawbone that had lost half its teeth and been bent straight. The legs prolonged this spine the way a man's do. They had no feet - they were the long, gnarled stumps of a horse's legs. The sum of these parts was hilarious and monstrous and had the likeness of a Greek marble statue. The skull was topped by a soldier's helmet, which was set on its peak like a straw bonnet on a horse's head. Personally, I could no longer tell whether I was supposed to feel anxious or start laughing. It became clear that if I did start laughing, this corpse of sorts would be nothing but a sarcastic jest; whereas if I started trembling, it would rush at me and tear me to pieces. I lost track of everything. The recumbent corpse turned into a Minerva in gown and armor, erect and aggressive beneath her helmet. This Minerva was also made of marble, but she was running around like a crazy woman. In her violent way she was perpetuating the jest that had delighted me and nevertheless left me aghast. There was tremendous hilarity in the back of the room, except that no one was laughing. The Minerva started whirling a marble scimitar in the air. Everything about her was corpselike. The Moorish shape of her weapon referred to the place where things were happening: a "scimitary" of white marble, of livid marble. She was gigantic. There was no way of knowing if I was supposed to take her seriously. She became even more equivocal. For the time being, there was no question of her coming down from the room in which she was running around to the alley where I had fearfully taken refuge. I had now grown small. When she saw me, she realized that I was afraid. My fear attracted her. Her gestures became ludicrously wild. Suddenly she came down and started rushing at me, twirling her lugubrious weapon with ever wilder energy. Things were coming to a head. I was paralysed with horror.

I quickly grasped that, in this dream, Dirty (now both insane and dead) had assumed the garb and likeness of the Commendatore. In this unrecognizable guise, she was rushing at me in order to annihilate me.

"Blue of Noon", Georges Bataille, 1957, translation Harry Mathews

Are you ashamed because you are alive

Changing moral codes is always costly: all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this. We cannot judge our behavior or that of others, driven at that time by the code of that time, on the basis of today's code; but the anger that pervades us when one of the "others" feels entitled to consider us "apostates," or, more precisely, reconverted seems right to me.

Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive, more useful, wiser, worthier of living than you? You cannot block out such feelings: you examine yourself, you review your memories, hoping to find them all, and that none of them are masked or disguised. No, you find no obvious transgressions, you did not usurp anyone's place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strength to do so?), you did not accept positions (but none were offered to you...), you did not steal anyone's bread; nevertheless you cannot exclude it. It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother's Cain, that each one of us (but at this time I say "us" in a much vaster, indeed, universal sense) has usurped his neighbour's place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; although unseen from the outside, it gnaws and rasps.

"The Drowned and the Saved", Primo Levi, 1986, translation Raymond Rosenthal

When you are attached to your desire

When you are attached to your desire, life becomes unacceptable. You start living a hidden demand that life be other than it is, and then you start to suffer and cause others to suffer. The present moment isn't acceptable because you aren't getting what you want, or you are not who you want to be, or there is something you wish to get rid of. Even if it is a pleasant moment, you worry about the future and wanting to have still more pleasant moments, so you are still being defined by attachment. You are not willing to accept what the future may be, so you suffer in this moment over what is really only a concept. But the future is not here now. It may turn out to be the way you want it to, or you may change your mind about what you want. What you believe will be awful if it happens may turn out to be not so bad or to lead to some unanticipated good alternative.

Do you see how delusional it is to take birth and suffer over something that is not even here? I'm not saying that you shouldn't have goals for the future, only that you should not be attached to the outcome of your goals. Clinging to the present moment being other than it is or to the future turning out a certain way is pointless. But desire clouds the mind, and once you have taken birth, wisdom disappears, so you do not see how your mind is deluded. As the Tao Te Ching states:

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestation.

If not the future, it may be the past that you are clinging to, wanting it to be other than it was. Maybe you had an unhappy childhood, or there was an event in your life that if only it hadn't happened your life would be different, or you caused harm to yourself or others, or you missed your chance for love or fortune. Outrage, a sense of injustice or cruelty, or a feeling of helplessness may fuel your suffering. In each of these instances, you are filled with the desire that things had been different. Can you see how hopeless and pointless this is?

"Dancing With Life", Phillip Moffitt, 2008

Then he remembered Slade's aircraft

Then he remembered Slade's aircraft speeding towards him across the solar mirrors, the small, vicious propeller that shredded the light and air, time and space. This failed astronaut had first come to the clinic seven months earlier. While Franklin was away at a conference, Slade arrived by air force ambulance, posing as a terminal patient. With his white hair and obsessive gaze, he had instantly charmed the clinic's director, Dr. Rachel Vaisey, into giving him the complete run of the place. Moving about the laboratories and corridors, Slade took over any disused cupboards and desk drawers, where he constructed a series of little tableaux, psychosexual shrines to the strange gods inside his head.

He built the first of the shrines in Rachel Vaisey's bidet, an ugly assemblage of hypodermic syringes, fractured sunglasses and blood-stained tampons. Other shrines appeared in corridor alcoves and unoccupied beds, relics of a yet to be experienced future left here as some kind of psychic deposit against his treatment's probable failure. After an outraged Dr Vaisey insisted on a thorough inspection Slade discharged himself from the clinic and made a new home in the sky.

The shrines were cleared away, but one alone had been carefully preserved. Franklin opened the centre drawer of his desk and stared at the assemblage laid out like a corpse on its bier of surgical cotton. There was a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum in Houston; a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bathroom, her white body almost merging into the tiles of the shower stall; a faded reproduction of Dali's Persistence of Memory, with its soft watches and expiring embryo; a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas; and an emergency organ-donor card bequeathing to anyone in need his own brain. Together the items formed an accurate anti-portrait of all Franklin's obsessions, a side-chapel of his head. But Slade had always been a keen observer, more interested in Franklin than in anyone else.

"News from the Sun", J.G. Ballard, 1982

His explanation was very elusive.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth about two pounds." People say that about everything that has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing is worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things - one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money - as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history - the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people - the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer - who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. The on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.

"The Fever", Wallace Shawn, 1991

She had come from the coast

She had come from the coast, where she had taken part in that latter-day annual ritual, the resurrection of the dead. I went to look at it once. From all over Europe they come, the white bodies, as if the Last Trumpet had sounded. Nudist beaches are permitted here these days, but just as nakedness used to be taboo in the past, so it is now forbidden to be white. All those bodies torment themselves during the day in order to stand before the mirror in the evening and, for these two weeks in the year, look invulnerable and therefore immortal. Everyone has his own resurrection. I do not say this out of prudishness, but I don't believe in it - it is a false faith, and during these rites they display their uninteresting genitalia to each other while at the same time pretending not to see them. Fatter or older people ought not to take part, but they do. They are not welcome; they disturb the illusion of paradise - the fat ones because they evoke thoughts of intemperance and therefore of the resulting Dantesque punishments of sickness, death and damnation; the old ones because they shamelessly display precisely that which everyone tries to deny, namely the future. They are like a silent but hysterical sect, all those nameless bodies that lie there burning like Saint Laurence on his roasting grid, as if they wished to be irradiated against the cancer of death  or to anticipate their own cremation, whereby the body, as a punishment because it has betrayed them, is pulverized at high speed in a macro-oven, until not a trace of their nameless lives is left. 

 

"In the Dutch Mountains", Cees Nooteboom, 1984, translation Adrienne Dixon

Evil is never intended as evil.

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is "the last, best hope on earth." It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.

Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.

Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

"Finite and Infinite Games", James P. Carse, 1986