Ashes to Ashes

The ashes I feel are in my lungs.  They are not a metaphor.  They give me a small feel for what cystic fibrosis might feel like, or maybe how my mom felt after losing the lower left lobe of her lung last summer.  Each breath burns my nostrils a little, and my voice has taken on a rasp. 

Last night I built a big fire in the fireplace, my remedy against the gathering darkness and cold of this November night.   It caught with vigor.   Within seconds, however, waves of smoke were rolling back toward me.  It took me a while to process how wrong this was, captivated by the gorgeous, silky billowing waves, like the fog that used to tumble over the mountains from the Pacific toward the Bay when I was in college.  "Down draft," my brain said. "This will pass." 

The smoke detector kicked sense back into me.   The house was now filled with smoke such that the other side of the living room was hard to see.  The flu, I thought with dread.  I texted our friend who dog-sat the night before.... "Did you by chance shut the...?" Her thought bubbles bounced on my phone as the smoke billowed forth.  "Yes, everything OK?" she replied.  I looked at the flames now lapping the top of the chimney with no place to go and the impressive arsenal of fuel I'd built below them.  Something short of OK.  Panic. 

By now the boys and dog had arrived on the scene.  Duncan began to shout instructions.  Fire extinguisher!  I grabbed some stick thing we keep beside the fireplace for this express purpose.  Couldn't peel the paper from it or find the string I was supposed to pull.  Useless.  Grabbed the next one, on the pantry shelf.  De-charged!  Nothing!  Think, think.  (Getting harder, nostrils burning, trying to push anxious children and dog to the door.)  Kitchen ~ last chance.  Read the instructions:  Pull off cap, yank out pin, point at fire, stay minimum 6 feet away... 

Pshrrrrrrrrrr!!!!   White foamy goop shot out, immediately dousing the flames.  Relief!  Though in my haste and protective instinct to block boys and dog, I stood more like 4 feet away with no heed to my own inhalation.  Out?  A few determined embers re-ignited and... Fire extinguisher empty!  "Water, Mom!"  Duncan runs to the kitchen sink to fill a mixing bowl.  "Let me, let me!" I shout.  I grab the bowl and fling it at the embers.  Now steam mixed with chemicals mixed with smoke and ash gurgle and billow from the angry gaping mouth of the fireplace.  Not enough!  Another bowl.  And ... we're out.

Our mantel now looked like one of those aerial photographs of a river delta after hideous poisoning by petrochemicals have made an ecological wasteland of once thriving intertidal waters.  Swirling patterns of ash and white foam and water.  Beautiful, a kind of ruination art.  The alarm, having fulfilled its purpose in alerting us to danger and saving our lives, had moved into Phase 2: Punishment, blasting us viciously for our ignorance. 

I scurried around to open all windows and doors.  Soon the house, which I had hoped to warm up to the temperature of a cocoon in the late summer sun now plummeted to about 34 degrees, or roughly the temp of sludge on the bottom on ponds where frogs burrow to wait out the winter.  Eventually, after much waving of Duncan's sweatshirt like a white flag of surrender, the fire alarm relented.  In the eery calm I surveyed the room.  A white dusting of ash everywhere.  Everywhere.  (To the far reaches of the house, I would discover this morning...)

Memories.  Emerging from an inn in Kyushu, Japan one morning while traveling with friend Tomoko, finding her car covered with what I thought was snow but was volcanic ash.  Wheezing while pregnant and walking Wiley Dog in the Hollywood Hills under gray skies and an apocalyptic-red sun while wild fires consumed mountains nearby.   The house I shared with roommates in Oakland when I was 26:  Waking up to the smell of smoke (no alarm) and eery flickering light under the door, opening it to find a wall on fire, a few feet from a Christmas tree.  Roommate Mara and I grabbed the fire extinguishers provided by our landlord; they both failed.  Reflexive, focus without feeling of fear, I beat the flames with an area rug while Mara gather up animals.  Suddenly pitch black, literally pitch ~ a greasy heaviness to the lungs.  Turning on the lights, a shocking solid white from floor to ceiling.  As the smoke dissipated to find black char around a floor heating unit where we'd learn later a fleece jacket had fallen and caught fire.  Delayed reaction, body quivering with fear as the what-if's flood imagination.

Sympathies.  With my cousins, whose historic summer home on Cape Cod burned this fall.  Oldest of same cousins, a volunteer firefighter who fought to save his own house from wild fires in Ketchum, Idaho the week after his twins were born.  A close friend who lost her father, a firefighter, when she was a young child.  With everyone in Napa Sonoma.  Countless people who know the particular force and terror of fire out of control.

I tossed and turned in the night, my lungs still laboring in house air still toxic.  I ended up sleeping with my windows open and the ceiling fan on.  At 6am I drank coffee outside in the Adirondack chair, greeting the morning stars before they gave way to the rising sun.  Never so grateful for fresh oxygen.  A breeze shook the white pines overhead, a sound that evoked the rustling of palm tree fronds at my grandparents' home on Key Largo, and an image of my grandfather's bare bum behind a bamboo screen as he changed into his bathing suit for a morning swim. Funny the strange tracks memory will travel.  Then a tender dream from my night of fitful sleep returned, impressions of a friend from San Francisco I hadn't thought about in months.  I didn't mind that it was 27 degrees as these thoughts rolled around.  I welcomed the cold and darkness I'd been running from.

I thought about how wildfires are a part of the natural cycle out west, and much of the damage they do is because they are not allowed to rage.   How much damage do I do when I'm not allowed to rage?   Western fires also crack open seeds for new forest growth.  Maybe I'm a seed.  I like this idea. 

Fire bears the weight of so many metaphors, pop songs, and Biblical significance.  There's a fire starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch and it's bringing me out the dark.  Standing outside the fire... Life is not right, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire... Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain.  A bush that burns without being consumed.   Passion, anger, revelation, purification.  Which metaphor to apply?  Maybe all.  Maybe none - just something that happened, burning away abstractions. 

Romantic Reality, Quality, Gumption, G-Traps & a few others from Zen

Some of the many passages to save before returning Robert M. Persig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the library...

     Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track.  Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been.  At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go.  You don't have pure reason – you have pure confusion.  The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is.  The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future.  It contains all the history of the past.  Where else could they be contained?

     The past cannot remember the past.  The future can't generate the future.  The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

p.283

******

     At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity.  At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts–thin art–because there's very little assimilation of extension into underlying form.  We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it's ghastly.  The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

p.294

******

     Lonely people back in town.  I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. ... You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face–that searching look–then it's gone.

     ...

    It's the primary America we're in.  It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since.  There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars.  And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them.  The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant.  And that's why they're lonely.  You see it in their faces.  First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object.  You don't count.  You're not what they're looking for.  You're not on TV.

p.356

*****

     "Man is the measure of all things."  Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality.  Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say.  Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say.  The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience.  He is a participant in the creation of all things.  The measure of all things–it fits.  And they taught rhetoric–that fits.

p.374

*****

    The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality.  He has to care! 

p.281

*****

     Stuckness shouldn't be avoided.  It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.  An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.  It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

p.286

***** 

     The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic.  It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow.  The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored. 

     The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable.  And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse.  Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony.  Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes.  Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes.  Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents.  You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while.  It's the style that gets you: technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style.  Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree.  Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

p.292

*****

     I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do.  I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning.  Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right.  The social values are right only if the individual values are right.  The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.  Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind.  I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.  I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

p.297

*****

     Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work.  It's the whole thing.  That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work.  The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work.  What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else.  The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds.  The way to see what looks good and understand the reason it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

     I say inner peace of mind.  It has no direct relationship to external circumstances.... It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one's circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification... The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness–so different from self-consciousness–which result from inner peace of mind.

     This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding.  Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve... Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved.  But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

p.295

*****

     I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along.  It's an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like "kin," seems to have all but dropped out of use.  I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality.  He gets filled with gumption.

     The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of "enthusiasm," which means literally "filled with theos," or God, or Quality.  See how that fits?

     A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things.  He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes.  That's gumption.

...

     The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it.  But it's nothing exotic...

    Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.  If you haven't got it there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed.  But if you have got it and know how to keep it there's absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed.

...

     What I have in  mind now is a catalog of "Gumption Traps I Have Known."  ...

The first type is those in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these "setbacks."  The second type is traps in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself.  ...

    This internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called "value traps"; those that block cognitive understanding, called "truth traps"; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called "muscle traps."  The value traps are by far the largest and most dangerous group.

     Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity.  This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values.  ... If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts...

     What you have to do if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down – you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not– but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine.   There's nothing wrong with that.  Just live with it for a while.  Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you'll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid way if you're interested in it.  That's the way the world keeps on happening.  Be interested in it.

********************

Marge and Me

Surely I've written about this before ~ my vexed relationship with minivans.   It almost got me a job when, still in Los Angeles, fresh out film school, filled with 30-something vanity I swore never ever to drive one, I got offered to direct a short film on this very identity crisis.   It got me into a bitter online battle with Park Slope Parents (.com) when, expecting a third baby, I asked the Brooklyn Parent Hive Mind for recommendations of vehicles – other than minivans – that could handle 3 kids; I got hate mail from parents who told me to "get over my ego" and "f*ing give it up."

I politely replied (trying to save myself from ostracism on the playground) that in excluding minivans, I only meant to encourage suggestions beyond known options.  I added, to cover my tracks, that I lived in a neighborhood with tight parking and so sought a vehicle with smaller profile.

Lies.  Or maybe truthiness rather than truth.  Yes, I knew the minivan option.  Yes, I wanted a smaller profile, but not to fit in a parking spot.  I wanted a smaller profile because, let's face it, we are what we drive.  The smaller profile I seek is my own.

My sister and mother have been driving minivans much longer than I, and if they are what they drive, then let's pause to examine how they have pulled it off.  My sister succeeds in making her van the coolest rig on the road.  Hers are grey.  She looks good behind that wheel:  Driving with her shades on and her sporty bangs and her laser-focus.  She has little sporty magnets to the back.  Her family just owns it ~ make it feel like a transport unit for a hot rod race car or something.

My mother has her own approach.  She positions rubber duckies in her window and keeps a Persian rug in the backseat for her Havanese dog.  Mom keeps an ample food supply, survival gear for every emergency, her gardening stuff, and a scattering of garden soil throughout.  It is home on wheels.

Me?  I've never owned it.  I haven't wanted to own it.  I haven't wanted Jordy to own it.  (I will go on the record saying I don't find men driving minivans to be sexy, except of course the sports god nephews my two sisters have spawned.)  I've wanted to hold my nose and get it over with.

This morning, driving the three boys to the bus stop in our bulbous navy blue minivan, Duncan remarked how people look like their cars.  "Interesting,"  I said, trying to mask my terror with false casualness.  "Kind of like they look like their dogs... So... Do I look like the van?"

To my relief, all three exclaimed, "No!"  Then Duncan added, "But you do look like the Audi."  Phew!  My ego sighed.

But I had to admit, I felt guilty.  As if I had betrayed a loyal old friend, even as she labored to make my life work, to get the kids to school, to haul our crap and deliver us from disaster...  "Poor Marge," I said.

You see, Marge was only recently Christened, and her name was picked after a major middle-age fix-up job.  The poor thing was just beaten to a pulp by our lifestyle.  Her back was sheared by a garage door carelessly closed on her; the back right bumper doesn't attach quite right.  Long ago, her sunroof stopped working, and we just left it.  The sliding doors were prone to snapped cables, making the boys scamper over each other awkwardly to get in and out.  Arguably a safety hazard as well as annoying.  We jokingly told the kids to "fasten their seatbelts and prepare for take-off" for many months during which a squealing metal-on-metal sound gave the impression of a jetplane winding up for ascension, a sound that appeared the day her hood got clobbered by a massive ice block that flew off a UPS truck, nearly taking the windshield (and me) out.  We never got around to diagnosing the squeal ~ it, like all of Marge's neglected quirks (and my own), just became a part of Marge.

And then there was her interior.  Dog hair.  Oh my god, the dog hair.  The consequence of making Marge into Lola's "crate" for episodes of social anxiety when visitors come to our house, such as the kids' music teacher, a friend small enough for Lola to hump, or actually anyone at all...  Add to her hair, Lola's greasy marrow bones, tension-relievers for the poor exiled creature that leave a stinky smear all over the leather seats.  Then add the lollipop sticks with sticky ends, gathering the dog hair, jammed in the cup holders in the back, and Gatorade bottles from two baseball seasons ago and Cheetos mashed into the carpet and gum hardened into the seatbelt clips... Those boys, the very same whose BEGGING compelled me to get this minivan on December 14, 2014 (but who's counting), had begun to BEG again to dispose of her.  "The van is gross!"  "Let's get a Ford Explorer!"  "A Suburban!"

And yet, though I've been waiting three years 11 months and some days to get rid of that van, my conscience cringed, as did our bank account.  Replacement is not an option ~ we will drive that van into the ground.  But it was deeper.   Over time, I've come to identify with her.  I am the beat-up middle aged vessel with a shockingly high number of miles on her.

Bless Jordy Green's good heart, he saw the value in re-investing in Marge rather than disposing of her.  He took her to the Toyota dealer, discovering that most of the repairs were still covered by the extended warranty he had insisted we get when we bought her, already used with 54,000 miles.  Hooray!

Her overhaul was MAJOR.   It took almost a month, in and out of the shop.  But when it was over, and after Tucker initiated an interior deep clean, we all remembered what a good pack mule our minivan is.  That's when we realized:  Maybe part of our disrespect was that we never named it.  Or her, as we all somehow agreed she was.  Hmmm.

After tossing options about, we settled on Marge.  Like Marge Simpson.  Like Frances McDormand's pregnant cop in Fargo.  She is our Marge.  Solid, broad, hard-working, unglamorous.  Deserving of our respect and gratitude.

As we got to the bus stop this morning, I asked the boys, "Guys, why do you think the Audi doesn't have a name?"  They didn't have an answer but they quickly had suggestions:  "Kareem!" shouted Duncan. "Tim!" shouted Tucker.  "Tim is a dumb name! Too common!" shouted Reeve.  "Well so is Kareem!"  (Boy, they can get a wicked fight going about anything!)  Diverting, I asked, "Why do you think you both came up with male names?"  This quieted them for a moment.  While they reflected, "I mean, I just think it's interesting you identify me with the Audi, but feel the Audi is a male."  Still no answer.  "That's cool," I said.  "Maybe it means I've got male and female sides.  Maybe it means I get to be both Marge and Tim-Kareem."

Time to catch the bus.