Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

                –Leonard Cohen,  Anthem

         It begins here, in a reminiscence of where we were a year ago.   Looking for something to read I picked an old book from the shelf and dusted it off.  It was a copy of the Vimilikirti Nirdesa Sutra, “Pure Land,” (Shambala Press, 1975).  There was a photo, I must have used it for a bookmark.

It was taken in the summer of  1978 at the San Antonio Zoo.   A polar bear, in all that Texas heat, waiting to have her swimming pool refilled.  A Polar Bear, living in captivity in Texas, surely there is something awry, out of balance, just by the existence of this predicament.

A year or two later there was the film by Godfrey Reggio and John Cage, whose title was a Hopi word for this condition: koyaanisqatsi, life out of balance.  I think I have felt it since childhood.  This is nothing special.  I think we are all experiencing this, one way or another.  

On the back of the photo were scribbled the important words, “Dvorak: Violin Concerto in A minor, opus 11.”  Nowadays music is instantly available, and one can find the recordings anywhere.  I am a fan of Apple Music–and mirabile dictu, there it is:  played by Isaac Stern .  Back then, one had to shop for vinyl or try to tape the music from an FM broadcast, hit or miss, or wait for Isaac Stern to show up, as he did with the San Antonio Symphony, many times, for many years.  Nothing out of balance there!  The KMFA program guide came monthly by regular mail.  FM radio was still a posh, comparatively new thing.  Heard it on the radio.  Wrote the title on any scrap of paper.

I still have taped cassette recordings of Sunday evening Boston Symphony concerts, even though I no longer have a tape player.  And lately, I have found other lists, as I sift and discard what I can.  I even found one on my iPhone:

Delius Summer Night on the River

Copland Quiet City

Teleman Sonata in E minor (septet)

All works that must have affected me some way or another.  Uncover, discover, discard.

Procrastination! I had to have heard the music, and been motivated to scribble something on a scrap of paper.  But this story, which looks static, is actually moving  too fast,  can never be completed. A teaspoon at a time, done, with a little effort, we’re already leaving 2020.

Pure Land teaches Śūnyatā, which might be called a state of being, or a meditative state, or an aspect of reality based in that state.  It explains the nondual, which can be experienced, and puts forth the suggestion that much of reality is illusory.  But there is this purpose, an end to suffering among living beings; a purpose of mitigating ignorance, that is cause for moving on.  What is the right course of action, given this condition of koyaanisqatsi so evident in present-day global crises, that has begun to present an ontological threat to life itself?

I don’t claim to be an expert about any of this.  The above was lifted from Wikipedia, heard somewhere, or has to do with something I remember having seen or read about somewhere.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the warming, scarcity of freshwater, the global threat to biological diversity and perhaps life itself all evoke within me a profound sadness, mixed with a hope that this the early anthropocene era is not also the late.

For the past 70 years and until recently, the worst threat to humanity was considered to be nuclear arms proliferation.  The Doomsday Clock printed on the front cover of each issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has presented that assessment since 1947.  In 2007 the editors added climate change to their list.  In 2012 the clock read five minutes before midnight.  It was two minutes before when I first began attempting to write this, late in 2019. A couple of weeks ago, something like 90 seconds. I have not checked since.  The annual report does not mention the novel coronavirus pandemic; and although not included in the threat assessment, the report does mention disruptive technologies as an as yet unassessed threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly cause enough to stop and consider the future of life, as a tsunami of change in social and economic organization is underway.  Again, these scribblings, originally inspired by experiences at Santa Fe in 2019, cannot keep up with the story.  Home is an isolated station connected to the rest of the world through the miracle of modern media and telecommunication.  The Jetta has been repurposed as the Terrestrial Excursion Module (TEM), and there are antiviral protocols observed before entering or leaving the TEM.

One does not have to look far to find these sentiments in art.  Last summer, at the Santa Fe art market,  I went looking.  In a Forest Glade presents obliviousness to–well, oblivion, a degraded dystopia, and that clock, ominously dangling from a fishhook, not in some future, but already present.  What is seen? esse est perspicere, reality an aspect of the ego.

As an antidote to this dismal idea, I hope to show  that a discussion of what is possible, at the least exploring best approaches, and stay unstuck from the paralytic effect of the cortisol-response-inducing barrage of social media, hypnotic television, and other solipsistic junk piling up around us.

It is time to consider real-world solutions, ideas and projects already underway, at this moment of reflection as to what to do next.   Of course, this brings up–what else? Another  list.