A Journal for Walking Over Fallen Fences

I’ve been thinking a lot about something Gore Vidal said this Saturday at the Los Angeles Festival of books. He blamed English Literature Departments for destroying the novel.

He said there is only one Finnegan’s Wake. We don’t need another. But such writings are taught and favored by the Ivory Tower. Academia does not value writers with concise voices that are easy to connect with.

Consider the sharply political and brilliant books of fiction by Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, and George Orwell. Now ask: Where are the new voices of fiction? I’m not talking strictly essayists or New Journalists. I’m talking writers of fiction. Novels. Characters. Plots. Funny words strung together. Smells of biscuits and sounds of helicopters. Where are the major contemporary writers who attack and expose the problems of society with clear directives and brilliant solutions? Or have English Literature Departments been silently “corrupting” potential voices to write impenetrable worlds for arcane readerships? Watchdogs for nobody.

Part of me wants to qualify this. I love my former English Department professors. I don’t want to believe they are at fault. Also, I consider myself a writer who wishes to use both the arcane with the concise, creating surreal styles and texts.  But I wonder… is academia rewarding novelists for bad writing? and in doing so, wrecking society?

This is frightening good. Aired in 1973 during NBC’s Midnight Special. Faithfull looks like an alien ancient Egypt nun, whereas Bowie is the trannie outer space alien. They walk the sincere farcical line. Lyrics take on new meaning. Coming together. Light years apart. I got you. Art like this doesn’t make it to television anymore.

On April 17, 2006, I posted my first comment in this online journal. I see this forum as a means to identify the invisible fences holding us back and then cross over into the unknown side. I look forward to another fun year.

For memory’s sake, I’ve selected my top ten posts from the past year, in order of date posted:

May 06, 2006 - Embarrassing Hindu Temples
May 25, 2006 - Ryan’s “John Henry” Revolution
Jun 11, 2006 - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Reincarnation
Jun 18, 2006 - South Central Farms Bulldozed
Jul 10, 2006 - Don’t Take the Road Less Traveled: Read More Poetry
Jul 16, 2006 - The Origin of Strawberries
Oct 28, 2006 - On Being Buried Alive
Dec 14, 2006 - Lighthouse at the End of the World
Feb 03, 2007 - Moses - The First Radical Second Wave Feminist
Feb 15, 2007 - Lupercalia (Valentine’s Day)

A reminder of features in this site that you might not have used:

• Permalink: At the bottom of each article is a permalink link. This open the article into its on page, which you can link to in other websites, forward to others, etc.
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As a final treat to you all, I’ve arranged with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to have today, April 17th 2007, be Free Cone Day. Just visit any participating Ben and Jerry’s store today and ask for your treat. Tell them Fallen Fences sent ya.

Mad love to you all.

Susan and I visited Mother Meera on Saturday. Mother Meera specializes in zapping people. To those who love her, she is the incarnation of Shakti, the divine mother.

The event was held at the Alta Loma High School auditorium in Rancho Cucamonga, a sprawling suburb of chain stores and malls. We drove through town listening to David Byrne’s Fuzzy Freaky extended remix:

I’m awfully cute, I’m awfully cold
I’m sometimes rich and I’m sometimes poor
A butterfly when I graduate
You’ll have to stop me if I get too big
Stop me
It’s summer time and the weeds are high
Fuzzy funny, freaky family….

Outside, we took off our shoes and set them aside 500 other pairs of shoes. As we opened the gymnasium doors, we bumped smack into the back of a long line of people sitting on the floor, scooting their way closer and closer to center stage. We joined the line, fixated at the woman in the middle of the stage, on a chair, before bundles of beautiful roses: Mother Meera.

The procedure goes as follows. When its your turn, kneel in front of her and touch her feet. She touches your head, scans you to see where you need help, and then transmits healing energy into you for several seconds. When she lets go of your head, you look her until she looks down, then you find a chair, reflect in silence, and wait till the others are done.

I returned to my chair casually, temporarily forgetting that I was just zapped, or not realizing that it might have implications. But almost as soon as I sat down, I was struck by an intense pain in my left shoulder. I closed my eyes and slipped quickly into a deep and great meditative state. It was about 30 minutes until I moved even the slightest again.

Everyone has different experiences. Some may feel nothing. Some go into convulsions. Some feel hot sensations around the head or other parts of the body. Say what you want about the reasons causing these symptoms (whether they be self-induced or not or both) but the fact of the matter remains that the symptoms occur.

I find her touch-and-zap approach to be a wonderful activism. She creates an environment without doctrines and without dogmas.  It is simple, free, and there are no expectations to join anything or sign up for anything.  Consider also the following simple activisms:

* Mata Amritanandamayi, “Amma,” The Hugging Lady - She gives thousands of people a hug and zaps them with energy.
*Shinto Monks - The monks sometimes walk slowly through crowded sidewalks. They ring a bell and take small steps. Rush hour traffic passes them, annoyed that The Flow is disrupted and blocked. Others hear the bell and die inside (my experience in Tokyo).
*Ryan Dunnerstick - Singing John Henry on the side of the freeway on the roof of a broken down car. Ryan is my brother, and although he performed this impromptu act only once, I think it has great potential.

Mother Meera Links:
http://www.mother-meera-la.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Meera

In 1907, in Lucas Kansas, the eccentric Samuel Perry Dinsmoor began building his cabin on a lot he named the Garden of Eden. The 64-year old spent the last 22 years of his life adorning the cabin with over 200 concrete sculptures, using 113 tons of cement.

In a corner of the garden is the mausoleum. There his remains rest inside a coffin made of concrete… complete with little glass window so you can see his smiling face.

The Garden of Eden tale in part poses the hypothetical idea of what paradise might have been like. Paradise for Moses and the writers of Genesis seems to be nudity and innocence and no one breaking their back working and farming because food was to be plucked off of trees.

I am comforted knowing that the Garden of Eden does exist and is in fact made of concrete. It is as if the writers of Genesis were obsessed with progress and the Industrial Age. They would rewrite Genesis and explain their Paradise Lost as a land of endless 12 lane highways all leading to concrete skyscrapers. God is the CEO in the corner office on the top floor. Oh utopia. Oh humanity.

Interesting Essay: http://www.missioncreep.com/tilt/dinsmoor.html
Many Photos: http://www.flyoverpeople.net/galleries/SmallTowns_2006/Lucas/p2.html

The eccentricity is also quite similar to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.
http://www.wattstowers.org/

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post has conducted a fascinating social experiment.

He took the “world’s greatest violinist,” Joshua Bell, and disguised him as a street musician. Using his $3.5 million dollar Stradivari, he played some of the most challenging pieces for a violin, beginning with “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history.”

As a street musician, would people notice his talent? Would a great crowd gather? Would no one notice at all? And to all those struggling artists out there: If there is true talent, but no one is there to recognize it, has that talent ever existed?

In Los Angeles, there is a group called the LA Urban Rangers. They collect historians, artists, curators, architects, and others, and turn them into urban park rangers. They conduct tours of interesting or banal parts of the city, and help bring out their magic.

What Magic are we missing right now?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
http://www.laurbanrangers.org/

Interesting to compare the means of income for traditional Chinese doctors and Western doctors.

Traditional Chinese doctors were reportedly paid for the number of healthy patients rather than sick ones. Chinese households paid the doctor for their knowledge of combining nutritional and energy alchemies to stop problems before they rooted. If the patient fell ill, the doctor had failed. (Of course, if a patient drank poison, had an accident, or caught the plague, that was hardly the doctor’s fault).

In Western medicine, doctors are paid when the patient becomes sick and needs diagnostics, drugs, or surgery. Sure Western doctors are paid for regular preventative checkups, but these services are expected to be cheap and minimal–definitely not an intense part of the patient’s everyday life.

Don’t we have it the wrong way? Shouldn’t we reward health instead of sickness? But if that happened, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals would lose much business to nutritional stores, exercise gyms, and energy practitioners. Parts of the health industry might fall into bankruptcy, become even more expensive, and then one day an emergency might come where you needed the fancy equipment.  Better off always being sick than to be healthy without a safety net.

I’ve just returned from a 10-day silent meditation. It was held in North Fork California near the Yosemite national forest. From 4:30 AM to 9:00 PM, we’d mediate, eat, mediate, eat, mediate, have tea, mediate, watch a video discourse, meditate, then sleep. They provided great vegetarian meals and lodging free of charge, funded by the donations of old students. The meditation technique is called Vipassana, which was what Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) taught when he was alive. It is not a religion, but rather a methodology to increase awareness and be happy.

The technique itself is simple: You observe your sensations without bias. For three and a half days we focused only on our nose breathing in and out. This sharpened our minds to a more subtle awareness. Next we began observing bodily sensations from head to toe. The sensations started from the most gross (like sharp pains, itching, etc) to the more subtle (blissful waves, humming, etc).

I learned quickly how easy it is to make yourself miserable. The mind either starts craving “good” sensations, averts from “bad” sensations, or loses awareness and spaces out on its own noise and interior dialogue. This disrupts the unbiased and equanimous nature of observation, and the mind becomes agitated. Without unbiased awareness, the mind is constantly reacting like a a wind-up toy clamoring and flapping aimlessly and endlessly. You learn it is much easier to sit for an hour without moving if you keep a calm nature. This then applies back in every day life.

In addition, with a practice of unbiased observation, higher levels of awareness begin to open up. Your sensations seem to have a mind of their own: They follow rhythms and patterns. As these become detectable, your body heals itself by releasing deep problems and illnesses to the surface. For example, on day four, when we learned a new technique of meditation, I immediately got a terrible headache followed by incredible nausea. This lasted for about an hour and then disappeared entirely. Fellow classmates (when we were allowed to talk at the end) told me many other stories as well (much more impressive: losing minds, reading minds, speaking in tongues….). I won’t go into that here, but the Internet has plenty of stories about people and their responses to various kinds of awakenings. But in an obscure way, I wrote about such symptoms in a journal entry a few months back.

It is one thing to write these words and understand them on a rational level, it is quite another to actually experience them. I recommend someone taking ten days out to do such a course.

Link to Vipassana courses worldwide: www.dhamma.org