Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Meditations and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, which is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression.…It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems while you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness as you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand to the floor. “We find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we had anticipated,” Schopenhauer wrote. “We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”
February 2011
Is That Grass Just Greener ‘Cause It’s Fake?
So you can scoff and snicker all you like at the shaggy, hangdog 27-year-old next door dressed in a baggy college sweatshirt and cargo shorts, taking empty pizza boxes and beer bottles to the dumpster. He could be a loser just trying to extend his adolescence indefinitely—or he might just be getting ready to change the world with what he creates in his unkempt guy lair.
Or, or, you know, hear me out here, I know this might sound crazy, he could just be content with living a nondescript life of simple pleasures, having seen plenty of reasons in his 27 years to doubt that marriage, parenting and mortgages are really all that. No, you’re right, that does sound crazy. Let’s just reheat some leftovers from Atlas Shrugged and justify his existence by the tiny fraction of a chance that he might come up with some world-shaking invention.
Air Traffic Controllers of the Human Soul
By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control. Assuming he’s able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks.
Obviously I know there’s political subtext to all this. But still, passing a law to prevent reincarnation? Choosing where you will be reborn as an act of political protest? Sometimes I just have to marvel at the fact that, you know, when you scratch the surface, human beings are really fucking insane underneath.
Saturday Shuffle
It’s feeling like spring around here, so it’s close enough to being time for another one of these.
- Maximum Balloon — Groove Me
- Emiliana Torrini — Fireheads
- Conjure One — Center of the Sun
- Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions — Drop
- In Extremo — Wessebronner Gebet
- Peter Gabriel — Sledgehammer
- How to Destroy Angels — BBB
- Supergrass — Late in the Day
- Radiohead — All I Need
- Steely Dan — Black Cow
- Basement Jaxx — Where’s Your Head At
- Populous — Bottom 02
- Fujiya & Miyagi — Dishwasher
- The Fratellis — Vince the Lovable Stoner
- Meat Puppets — Violet Eyes
- Elbow — Fallen Angel
- Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears — Sugarfoot
- The Dandy Warhols — Insincere
- Goldfrapp — Little Bird
- Moby — Porcelain
We are Changed by What We Change
This is a really interesting, wide-ranging interview with Reza Aslan. I’m just gonna get out of the way and let him talk:
I mean the truth is that there is a kid in Los Angeles right now that has more in common with a kid in Indonesia because they like the same music and the same movies, than either of them have in common with their own communities. So the very concept of society has shifted. This is one thing that I never get tired of talking about, that from the dawn of humanity the definition of society and community was geographically defined. Community means, who is around me; who’s next to me? That’s my community. Until twenty years ago. From when we started walking upright to about twenty years ago, that’s what society meant. And it doesn’t mean that anymore.…We were talking about this and it occurred to us that when we were in high school we didn’t have email. I completely forgot about this. We didn’t have email, and we didn’t have cell phones. So we were all sitting there, suddenly remembering that in order (because I had a very tight-knit group of friends in high school) to get in touch with each other we would have to call our parents. And we’d have to say, “Is Reza home?” I don’t remember it. As far as I know I’ve always had email and I’ve always had a cell phone. But to be confronted by that change is to become aware that we are living through this catastrophic global transformation.…My very good friend Eli Pariser—he’s writing a book, he created MoveOn. He’s writing this really fascinating book—and this part is not all that unique because it’s something that most tech people would say, is that when we were younger and the Internet was coming along, the excitement was that this would be a truly democratizing thing, this was going to be the technology that not just changed the way we communicate and the way we identify with each other, but it was going to democratize understanding, it was going to create so much access that knowledge would become second-hand. Everything you want to know is now available to you. And what we found over the last half-decade is the exact opposite has happened. What the Internet has done is it’s even more fractured people, it’s become the ultimate sounding board, you never ever have to be confronted by any opposing views for the rest of your life anymore.Guernica: We’re at a time that is very similar to the printing press being invented. I think about this all the time with my students: For a long time I would get on them, I mean, I still get on them in their essays about punctuation, but there are things students are doing with language right now that I was really upset about for a long time and then I thought, “But is it possible we are at a moment when a new language is being created?” And that is terrifying.Reza Aslan: I always love, if you ever read Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, he essentially created spelling. Before that you spelled things however you wanted to spell it, phonetically. And then Johnson wrote a dictionary and then that’s how it’s spelled, forever, all of a sudden. So I wonder if we’re sort of in a similar place like that where if I see text-speak or something, I won’t poke my eyes out with a hot iron, but then I think, Jesus, is this how everyone is going to be writing in a hundred years? And is there anything to be done about that or is it just the evolution of language?Guernica: And I’m also beginning to understand it. I used to get a text from someone and I’d have no idea what’s being said. But now I am beginning to understand the language. And that’s fascinating how at some point it goes beyond my choice even (if that makes sense).Reza Aslan: But, there will always be people like you and me to complain about this.
We Came From the Breeze
I was talking about poetry with a friend the other day, and she said she favored long narrative ballads, naming writers like Service, Kipling, Tolkien, and some Frost.
But you can see in the poems I’ve shown you, this driving, pounding beat, this rhythm that underlays the words and carries it strongly, til it almost echoes. That’s why I got disillusioned with free verse. Sure, once in a while you find one that still manages that rhythm, but they’re so far between, I just gave it up.
On the other hand, as evidenced by the Basho quotation up in the top corner, I consider Eastern poetry a cornerstone of my poetic worldview; haiku was the first form that really enthralled me, especially for its connection to Zen Buddhism. When Buson says:
I go, you stay;
Two autumns.
The space in the poem is so vast, and with time being measured in “autumns”, you get the sense of his melancholy without having to hear him say in so many words, “I’m lonely. I miss you.” You feel his sadness without hearing the words that might numb you to it by dint of their familiarity. We hear those kinds of straightforward sentiments so often, we forget to really feel what they symbolize.
Robert Haas elaborated on this indirect way of expression:
The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. In Basho’s poem quoted above, for example, the phrase aki fukaki, “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens” is traditional and had accumulated references from earlier poetry as well as from the Japanese way of thinking about time and change. So does the reference to snow—yuki, which can also mean “snowfall”—in Buson’s poems. It is always connected to a sense of exposure to the elements, for which there is also a traditional phrase, “winter bareness.” The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear either in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem… These references were conventional and widely available. They were the first way readers of the poems had of locating themselves in the haiku. Its traditional themes—deep autumn, a sudden summer shower, the images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, of spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, of the cormorant-fisherman in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in the spring—gave a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world.
In a chapter devoted to the poet Issa, Sam Hamill pointed out the ubiquity in his poems of mono no aware (a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality) and sabi (a kind of spiritual loneliness). Two of my favorites of his, both in honor of the deaths of his young children:
This world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…
A Buddhist equanimity tries to assert itself in the face of intense suffering, but the all-too-human emotions refuse to be pacified. Gets me every time.
Windy fall—
these are the scarlet flowers
she liked to pick.
Again, the indirect focus, not on his daughter, but on the memories attached to everyday objects. The pain of it seems to hit me harder this way.
The Eastern poets appealed to me because that’s how so many of my insights appeared to me — a sudden, intuitive flash, a widening of the eyes, a sharp intake of breath. The words came later, and sometimes just got in the way. I can appreciate a rhythmic story, but when it comes to getting at what seems to me to be the heart of the poetic experience, I tend to feel that the less words, the better. In this case, the poet’s job isn’t to lay it all out and say Here’s what happened, here’s how it happened, and here’s why it happened, it’s to place words sparingly around the experience without trying to land directly on it.
A Long Time Ago I Never Knew Myself
Grunge set me off on a journey I’m still on. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and their peers used rock stardom as a vehicle for exposing gullible teenagers like me to parts of life that were previously obscured or hidden from mainstream view. Records, movies, books, ideas—all it took was a casual reference to something you’d never heard of an in interview or an album’s liner notes to point you toward another avenue to explore, which then led to more avenues. These bands don’t matter? My God, if you were like me, they gave you the world.This music changed me. It was important to me. I guess it always will be.
I have a very vivid memory of sitting at my high school graduation, staring at all the caps and tassels in front of me, thinking about all my peers and their talk over the previous weeks about their futures. They seemed so sure of themselves, sure of why they were going to college and sure of what they would do with the education they got there. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I have that sort of self-assurance, or at the very least, why couldn’t I fake it?
There was one small kernel of an idea in my head that alleviated the worst of the anxiety, though. I was already starting to tell people that I wanted to be a musician.
Just a couple years earlier, though, I didn’t even have that. I was an average student, one of those blessed/cursed with so much “potential”, if only I would “apply myself”. Those Bs and Cs could so easily turn into As and Bs if only I would put in that little extra effort. But I wasn’t terribly interested in most of what was being taught, and as I got into the high school years, those Bs and Cs started occasionally turning into Ds and Fs, mostly when it came to post-algebra math.
It became a ritual almost every nine weeks, the “family meeting”, which essentially meant a lecture from my dad about the latest report card while my mom tried to stake out some meaningless middle ground, pleasing no one. He was well-educated and successful in two different lines of work, and impressed repeatedly upon me the need to start thinking seriously about my future and the need to start preparing for it immediately. Get those grades up. Get involved in some extracurricular activities; colleges like to see someone who looks “well-rounded”. You’re isolated from your peers. You’re isolated from your teammates. You don’t want to end up with no money and no options when you’re older, do you? Do you have any ideas of what you want to do with your life? Once, when I was maybe about fifteen or sixteen, I remember staring at a spot on the table in front of me and saying in a small voice that all I really knew that I loved doing was listening to music. His response was to start talking about the sort of work you can do within the record industry. Office-related work, which had nothing to do with what I was saying at all. At one point, he talked about sending me to military school with the idea that the stricter regimen might keep my mind from wandering. For a kid who found ordinary school brutal enough, this was the closest thing to hell I could imagine. I remember going up to my room, digging out the saddest song I knew at that point to listen to repeatedly, and crying myself to sleep.
I thought about suicide a lot those days.
So sick of not fitting in, so sick of wondering why I couldn’t fit in, so sick of just living in constant fear of everything. I had shoplifted a bottle of sleeping pills at one point, which I kept hidden in my room. Just knowing it was there was a strange comfort, knowing I had a clear way out if things ever got too bad, and luckily, I never reached the limits of my endurance.
It almost seems quaint now, thinking back to how easy it was to feel so isolated in those pre-Internet days. Adolescents have always felt that way and still do, of course, but I think there was a slightly heavier burden to bear when, for many of us, there was really no way to find out about other people, other ways of thinking and acting. We didn’t even have cable TV at the time. If you didn’t fit in with the people around you, that was your problem. You knew the kids you went to school with, and that was pretty much it. And I didn’t care to know many of them. On graduation night, I got my diploma, walked back into the school to return my cap and gown, stood around for a minute in the cafeteria watching them all cheer and slap each other on the back, and thought to myself, Why am I still standing here? I don’t give a fuck about any of these people. I walked on out and went home. I’ve never seen most of them since.
I listened to a lot of heavy metal at the time, and Metallica was a particularly valuable lifeline for me. I had started letting my hair grow and getting tattoos. I was playing drums at the time, and corralling a couple friends to play other instruments. But the year after I left school, there was a video on TV from a band called Nirvana.
I’m not going to try to outline everything significant about that fact; Hyden has spent ten installments going over the same topic and still had to leave a ton of stuff out. For me, the important thing was I finally had a template for a new way to live in what the media would begin referring to as grunge. Here, in magazines and on MTV, were people who looked like me while embodying a passion that I never allowed myself to acknowledge, let alone express. Here were people who talked about literature and poetry in interviews and made it sound fascinating. Here were people who made an example of how to live in a way that didn’t embrace the mindless hedonism of typical L.A. rock music, or the empty, acquisitive values of society in general. How to live — the question I had been trying to answer for myself without even knowing how to ask it. I read William Burroughs because Kurt Cobain talked about him. I read Charles Bukowski because the Red Hot Chili Peppers mentioned him in a song. I heard Henry Rollins talk about reinventing himself from a scared, weak little kid into a hardcore punk legend with the help of some philosopher named Nietzsche. I had a brief handwritten-letter correspondence with Otis from Animal Bag. I could go on for hours. Like Hyden said, it only took the mildest of references to send me off on another ravenous search for more knowledge and experience to add to my expanding worldview, and the search itself was intoxicating.
One day, I came down the stairs softly and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen, unaware of my presence. My dad was telling my mom about this regrettable path I had taken, saying that as far as he could see, I had doomed myself to a subpar life of subsistence wages. No decent woman would ever be interested in me, given the way I looked. He felt that he had done all he could, and was resigned to having to wash his hands of whatever I became. My mom was agreeable as always. I stood there for a moment thinking, and then continued on my way out the door. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own from then on.
I spent the next ten years or so focused on writing and recording music, until developing RA. By then, I had given up on the idea of making a living at music anyway, but I didn’t need that fantasy anymore. I had made a life out of it. I gave it my heart, it gave me the world. I’ll always be grateful.
And So the Conversation Turned Until the Sun Went Down
I haven’t disappeared, I just spent a long weekend visiting with a close friend. Taking turns reading out loud, trips to the mountains to enjoy the almost-spring weather, and lazing around on the couch watching TV. Life is very good. Back to the blogospheric grind as soon as I catch up on sleep.
Give Up Your Vows
Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere, too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically – or perhaps realistically – confined, by the aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.
Mistermix:
Most of these marriages would be a hell of a lot better if the sexually unsatisfied partner had a discreet affair, but that puts the other partner in a socially untenable situation. “Open marriage” is something for dirty hippies or sleazy swingers, not an upstanding member of society.…If we want to do something about the high divorce rate, we might want to get real about making sexual satisfaction a precursor to marriage, and also about the role of a discreet, mutually agreed-upon affair as a safety valve. Of course, religion and social norms rule that out-of-bounds.
There’s a lone genius—possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial—behind Ashley Madison. His name is Noel Biderman, and he’s the chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. “Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment,” he declares. It’s unclear if Biderman actually believes this—he’s married and has two young kids—but like Hugh Hefner before him the business he has created pretty much requires that he say it. Behind his desk, in an office so lacking in embellishment it almost looks like a hastily assembled low-budget film set, is a large flat-screen monitor promoting his company’s flagship brand. It reads: “Life is short. Have an affair.”…Research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20 to 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. Moreover, men have an evolutionary prerogative to spread their genes as widely as possible, while women are driven to find a mate and try to gain access to the best genes out there by any means necessary.
It is my Buddha Nature to be omni-sexual. If you pluck one string on a well-tuned guitar the one next to it will vibrate because it’s the nature of sound waves. Well, my husband picks a certain chord. Then you, you hit this string and you over there, this string. You can’t hit her string. Your frequency is completely different. It’s not confusing to me. You can’t pluck my husband’s string and he can’t pluck yours.
Rationally speaking, it probably would make a lot of people much happier if the tangled threads of sexuality, love and marriage could be teased apart. Who can even begin to tally up how many decent relationships have been ruined because of a misguided notion that a burning passion, which by definition is temporary, can be sustained over years and decades? You’re not allowed to sign legally binding documents under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but people make hugely important decisions all the time while high on the sorts of chemicals that infatuation releases. Maybe the old way had merit, of looking at marriage as a way of protecting property and heritage, while discreet affairs were for getting rid of those irrational passions before they caused damage in everyday life.
For some people, though, sexual attraction isn’t just a simple matter of finding someone physically attractive and at least tolerably pleasant to have a couple hours of fun with. Sometimes the qualities that others look for in a relationship are what make a person sexually desirable in the first place. Even as a young, studly musician, I never had any interest in casual sex. Granted, some of that was due to my withdrawn nature which made such intimate contact with strangers too overwhelming to contemplate, but some of it was because I just couldn’t find anything stimulating about looking at people like they were a piece of attractive meat, independent of personality.
I know that sounds pretentious and contrived, like the kind of guys who joke about how much more often they get laid now that they’ve learned to talk like a feminist, but it’s true. I was watching Louis C.K.’s recent comedy special Hilarious, and he talked about how depressing it is as a newly-divorced 41 year-old trying to redevelop his atrophied social skills on the dating scene, only to be repulsed by the shallow, predictable identities that people all wear. “Who are you? What are you all about?” “Uh, I’m The Girl That All The Guys Want To Fuck!” You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, from the bimbos to the broheims. It’s like everyone learned their social skills by watching thousands of hours of beer commercials.
Speaking of which, I wonder sometimes why we associate superficial attractiveness with sexual desire anyway. Is it really the product of relentless advertising? Are we just Pavlov’s dogs, trained to connect a certain body type and charisma with all the subtle signals that get the lizard brain going? Is there any logical reason to expect that someone who looks handsome or pretty will be more pleasurable in bed? Or would the evolutionary psychologists say that we’re drawn to certain features that somehow indicate good genes?
I have no idea what to think about any of this. This is why I’m a hermit.
They Act Like Earth Was Terrestrial Prison
In the end, Caruncho and Fernández say they want to separate romance from reality, but their diagnosis leads to a conclusion no less romantic, and no less religious, than the legend: that our own bodies can generate within us a sensation of the divine. From this, maybe the romantics and neoclassicists can be brought together for a new notion of genius, one that allows for, and sometimes necessitates, ecstatic irrational reveries that must still be grounded in practice if good works are to be produced. After all, visions alone are not enough. If Chopin hadn’t practiced his piano, he may never have gotten past the Polish border. But his experience of the sublime, whatever its cause, was a real factor in his ability to compose as well.
Works for me. I don’t get why so many people think our most sublime experiences are diminished unless we pretend they descend, uncaused, from some mysterious dimension outside of space and time. Again, I blame Plato.