The Curse of Enlightenment

 

Something I'm grateful to the pandemic for is the development and greater use of Zoom as a method for attending meetings and lectures. This week I've been at several webinars sponsored by the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, an event they're calling The Buddhism and Ecology Summit: Transforming Anxiety into Awakened Action.  Today's seminar was titled From Mindfulness to Movements and featured activists Michelle King, Dekila Chungyalpa, and Bill McKibben

I've been attending because, like I think.many people are, I am anxious about what is happening to the environment. I'm a child of the 60s and recall too clearly the information, new to the public, that the ecosystem (brand new term) was in trouble and certain things needed to be done or be stopped in order for people to live comfortably in the then-far future of the 21st century. Like many, I calmed myself saying, "By then, practices.will be put into place to counteract all that. There's nothing to worry about, the adults will have it taken care of."

Of course, the adults have not, and in terms of our likelihood of avoiding environmental crises, we're at a further remove than we were then, as solutions like solar, wind, geothermal are more controversial among leaders of industry than to their forebears. President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof. They become a source of ridicule to the opposition and Reagan had them removed.

So yes, I worry about the end of human life and civilization, although I was also startled by my agreement a few days ago with author Michael Hinton's statement that the so-called 6th Extinction which we are doing our best to bring about by doing nothing at all is as natural as previous extinction events brought about by volcanoes, meteors, and ice ages, and may in fact herald "another set of miracles" like all those others. 

Like Hinton observed I am jealous of anything like that because I'm "in love with the environment as it is now" and don't want to see it changed in a huge way. But a remark by Michelle King about "being the practice" rather than just doing it reminded me too of something I was told at Dhammapada monastery so many years ago.

First, we have to recognize we aren't going to solve the crises. It will take many generations to turn them around just as it took many generations to fuck them up. And secondly, we can't abdicate our--those of us who see clearly and dismsyingly what is happening--responsibility for opening the eyes of others to it. After a period of time at Dhammapada I approached the Abbott during my weekly interview and told him, "Well, I've become enlightened." He looked at me blankly for a few moments and then it terrible sadness crossed his face. "I am so very sorry," he said, clinching my diagnosis. Because it's axiomatic in practice that, once you become enlightened you will see all the problems of the world. Once you can no longer ignore them or rationalize them away, you are responsible for doing what you can to rectify them.

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable.