Anger, Pride, and Truth(s)

Anger, Pride, and Truth(s)

A man's real value is measured by how he deals with facts and truths. Failure to acknowledge their existence is an indication of emotional weakness and intellectual cowardice, no matter how loudly he tries to assert the contrary. There are plenty of scumbags and cowards cyberspace nowadays. More often than not, when they accuse and insinuate of the negativities of others, they are the ones who possess those negativities in abundance. Self-projection is the proclivity hoodlums and hooligans are heirs to, but it's something they are blithely unaware of, although common sense would dictate that thieves always assume that others are as dishonest as themselves.

I am sitting next to a young fellow in an airplane who just opined that he just wanted to be happy. So I asked him what happiness meant to him. Health, Love, and doing whatever it turned him on as long as it would not hurt anybody, said he. I smiled in broad concurrence with him. Yes, life is a bitch and then we die. I personally don't give a fuck about fame and money. I, too, want to be happy and happiness to me is to read and write and to learn foreign languages while being truly loved by at least one woman. I already solved the issues of God, patriotism, and politics. I have already understood what lurks in the hearts and minds of hoodlums and hooligans. And I long ago comprehended the physical/bio/chemical processes that govern the transformation of energy.

Thus I've been chuckling at the affected prose of poseurs and cheap-shot artists who couldn't argue with me and had to hide behind their cheap shots and low blows to get their rocks off.

(To be continued)

爐 中 小 火

爐 中 小 火



劈 山 錯 覓 舊 雲 蹤,

破 鏡 妄 求 昔 日 容,

戽 水 癡 心 尋 鯉 影,

回 家 火 未 熄 爐 中.

陳 文 良



Âm Hán Việt:



Lô Trung Tiểu Hỏa

Phách sơn thác mịch cựu vân tung,

Phá kính vọng cầu tích nhật dung,

Hố thủy si tâm tầm lý ảnh,

Hồi gia, hỏa vị tức lô trung.

Trần Văn Lương









Dịch nghĩa:



Đốm Lửa Nhỏ Trong Bếp Lò



Xẻ núi lầm lẫn đi tìm vết chân của đám mây cũ (đã bay qua),

Đập vỡ kính sai lầm mong cầu (được lại) bóng dáng ngày xưa, (1)

Lòng ngu si tát nước để tìm hình ảnh của con cá chép, (2)

Quay về nhà (mới thấy) lửa chưa tắt trong bếp (3)





Ghi chú:



(1) Khóc Thị Bằng của Tự Đức:



...

Đập cổ kính ra tìm lấy bóng"

...



(2) Bích Nham Lục, tắc 7, Huệ Siêu Vấn Phật



Bài Tụng của Tuyết Đậu :



Giang quốc xuân phong xuy bất khởi,

Chá cô đề tại thâm hoa lý.

Tam cấp lãng cao ngư hóa long,

Si nhân du hố dạ đường thủy.



Nghĩa :



Ở Giang quốc, gió xuân thổi không lên,

Chim chá cô kêu hót trong rừng hoa.

Sóng cao ba bực con cá đã hóa rồng (bay mất),

Kẻ ngu si vẫn còn tát nước tìm trong ao đêm.





(2) Ngũ Đăng Hội Nguyên, quyển 9, Qui Sơn Linh Hựu Thiền Sư



Sư (Qui Sơn) một hôm đứng hầu thầy là Bách Trượng.

Bách Trượng hỏi:

- Ai đó ?

Sư đáp:

- Là con.

Bách Trượng bảo:

- Con vạch trong bếp xem có lửa không.

Sư vạch bếp xong thưa :

- Không có lửa.

Bách Trượng đứng dậy, vạch bếp thật sâu, tìm ra chút lửa giơ lên và nói:

- Sao bảo là không có lửa ?

Sư bỗng nhiên đại ngộ, lễ bái và trình kiến giải.







Phỏng dịch thơ:



Lửa Bếp

Xẻ non tìm dấu mây qua,

Đập gương mong gặp nét hoa năm nào,

Dại khờ cố tát cạn ao,

Về khơi bếp, lửa may sao vẫn còn.

Trần Văn Lương

Cali, 03/2013



Lời than của Phi Dã Thiền Sư :

Mây bay qua nào để lại dấu vết trong núi.

Người đi rồi nào còn gì để lại trong gương.

Cá hóa rồng rồi đâu còn để lại ảnh trong ao.

Thế mà chúng sinh vẫn mê mờ xẻ núi tìm mây,

đập gương tìm bóng, tát nước tìm cá.

Nào hay ngọn lửa trong bếp vẫn còn luôn âm ỉ!

__._,_.___
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Contempt

I am contemptuous of hypocrites and cowards because I feel they are no better than animals. The mere thought of them brings on a wave of revulsion over me. Yet ironically their existence helps me stay on the right path, helps me be determined not to be like them.

I realize that the need to survive sometimes forces us to do the very things we abhor and turns us into hypocrites and cowards. I hope I won't find myself in that situation. I have too much pride and abundant feelings of superiority to degrade and debase myself as the motherfuckers in NZ, Australia, Vietnam, and the U.S. (2 dudes each in D.C, Houston, and CA) have done. They are absolutely filth and scums of the earth, holding no genuine sense of self-respect.

Unintended Pomposity

I read an unnecesarily long-winded mini-lecture on how to live by a poet who obviously takes himself very seriously. By expanding his statement into a mini essay on how to live, he came across unwittingly self-righteous and all-knowing, contrary to the very spirit he was exhorting others to adopt. Nobody is reallly that stupid and blithely unself-aware as portrayed by the poet, not the type that frequents the website the poet administers.


Prior to reading the above-mentioned lecture, I had come cross a refefence to how the Iroquois warriors of yore gave themselves visions by fasting. The reference resonated deeply with me as several acquaintances and friends had commented that I looked pale and gaunt and intense and obsessed. They all said, Roberto, whatever it is going on, I hope it's worth it. To that, I gravely nodded my head and waved at them the book I was carrying with me. The book bore the title "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs".

I am not at all sure if I have within the conviction and courage to be the martyr. I never regarded myself as the martyr material anyway. i just spoke extemporaneously. I extemporized, consequences be damned. All I remember these days are the soft, barely audible words of Mary, the freshly unemployed college professor who auditioned for a teaching job at a small liberal arts college out East, at the end of her extemporaneous speech on the "martial" spirit of the Iroquois:

"Mend your lives. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts and the strength of your arms.Though you soar aloft like an eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn the power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly. "

I wish she had added, "Speak the truth. Don't lie. Don't be so impressed with yourself."

Wissai
March 27, 2013

Banality

I have heard that banality and senility go together. No where did it display so vividly in recent inane "discussion" in a certain forum about the ills of the euro and the economic bailouts of certain European economies and the analogous (the poor men didn't use such a helpful, clarifying term; I inserted it here because that was I thought the poor souls were grappling at) role of the U.S. in the Middle East. It was hilarious to see ignorant, senile old men affectedly pontificate, using terms of generalities, on matters that were clearly outside of their understanding and knowledge.

Silence

What more could I say?
I was very stupid more than once
And that was more than enough
Wouldn' t you think?
No, I woukdn't blink
And let you have a peek of my heart
I am not saying I am tough
But I won't ever let my world fall apart
Because of a woman ever again
I repeat I am through with Love
As Love always lets me down
Anytime I think of the women in the past
I shudder at my stupidity

What do you expect me to do with regard to certain assholes? Curse and swear at them to death? Or establish a love squad and drive them to distraction? You know I cannot do either way. I just hope I can live for a thousand years. Meanwhile all I can do is to fucking wait and wait for pigs flying in formation and be happy at the sane time and learn to keep my big mouth shut. I certainly wouldn't want to make the same mistakes as they did. You just never know what lurks behind the smiling faces of midgets and ugly emaciated monkeys. Just remember one thing: life does have a nasty sense of humor, so be prepared to laugh with it. You think I'm trying to be cute? Asshole, you don't know what cute is even if it hits you on the head with a two by four. Trust me.

Five days ago, a spinster miser died of an undeserving death. She had a lot of money, almost a million dollars and she was living in Vietnam, not a high-priced, expensive place like the States or something. A million dollars really mean something over there. She could have easily spent some of it to save her life. She only had some kind of heart or kidney or liver problem. Her body was retaining water and she didn't feel well. So I got on the phone, calling long-distance, really long-distance, and begging her to part some of her money to save her life by checking herself into a hospital. Man, she didn't listen to me. She just wouldn't. Her relatives who also had money, but they let her waste away in about four weeks. Now they are fighting over her money, after throwing a big funeral. Some people are just sick and cruel, don't you think. But I cannot talk anymore. I am into silence now. Verbosity makes the assholes think I am shallow and dumb. Up until a few days ago, I was in fact very dumb and shallow and naive and idealistic. I am coping with anger at both my own stupidity and human evil. This was rupture on rupture of consciousness, this double awareness of my stupidity and lack of sophistication is changing me radically, hopefully for the better. I don't think I am engaging in "Verschlimmbesserung". On the other hand, my realization that I have tackled some most basic existential issues (God, meaning of life, the physical and chemical process at work as we know it/transformation of energy) plus my awareness that I have some verbal gifts and rare intellectual and emotional honesty have reinforced a feeling that perhaps i am indeed superior to most humans.

Silence is strength. What would you prefer? Noise and thunder or peace and silence while waiting for the right moment. Good things come to those who wait. The punishment would fit the crime. So you wait and wait while cultivating strength and silence, while thinking, really thinking of the whole dynamics of the birth of emotions as the soft piano music echoes in the hall of your soul. But you had better not to think too much as madness comes in when thinking is not finalized with action. A person's history is like that of his people. Dead and living history. A person's dead history involves his memory. A people's dead history lies in history books and in museums. Living history involves current speech and customs and consciousness and self-identity.

You once wrote the following to a pathetic creature:

"Get lost and stay lost. You were too stupid to understand me. And your life is nothing but a pathetic waste of earth's resources. No light and no thunder. An absolute zero and nothingness. Not to mention a blight on the human landscape, a scar on your children's consciousness. Last but not least, you are a pest, a festering, pestering pimple on my beautiful ass.

You can't read, can't understand me. What I have written the last few days are some of the most profound/penetrating insights into the human condition. And yet you chose to comment on the seeming misogyny conveyed by a few lines of verse. How pathetic. A monkey looks into a mirror and all it sees is another monkey looking back at it. It cannot see beyond its own image, its shadow. It cannot escape its own smell either."

Of course, you could have observed silence and chosen to ignore the creature, but your doing so would falsely give it an impression it was a creature of some worth. Truth must be told, that was what motivated you to say what you did, milk of human kindness be damned. Kindness may make him feel good, but it is Truth that would save him because it helps him see. A blind man is unlikely to live long in this harsh world.

Death is a finality which puts all things into perspective. You are 64, right at the age of one of the songs of the Beatles. The more you interact with humans, the more you realize most of them are selfish, pompous, stupid, ignorant, uninformed, weak-minded, and pathetically defensive. Deception is understandable, but self-deception is a sign of weakness and cowardice. As you stated somewhere, life is not worthing if lived in the shadow of ignorance and cowardice.

Tomorrow you will combine meditation with physical fitness: strengthening the mind and the body at the same time.

Today "it was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade" (Great Expectations)

For a long time you did not really live. You breathed, ate, held a job, slept, and felt life slipping away from your grasp. It was becoming monotonous, insipid, and meaningless. You sensed the danger of playing it safe with life. Your consciousness, the inner voice was telling you that zest was missing in your life and that the morning sun meant nothing to you. You wanted to change all that angst, that dreadful feeling of emptiness. You wanted to see and taste and experience how life could be brutal and ruthless. So you turned your back on bourgeoisie and embraced risk. You plunged into a world where people lied, cheated, and killed in order to stay alive while trying not to lose your humanity. You learned not to internalize anger and contempt. You learned to recognize Man for what he is: Man is a sorry piece of creation or evolvement, not to be trusted and hard to respect because beneath all that veneer of civilization and culture, he is a vain, insecure, and fearful beast. He was afraid of the ugly truths about himself leaked to the outside world. Little did he know because of his vanity and his fear he showed his true colors to the world anyway. The more scumbags and assholes in that forum of the bygone era tried to look respectable, the ugly their nature was revealed..You supposed that Hitler and his ilk understood very well the human heart. And now it was your turn to understand it.

(To be continued)

Possible Verities

Possible Verities.

It's tiresome and boring to talk about oneself even if one thinks he is interesting and unusual. In fact, it is vain to think that one is interesting. Vanity is ego. Ego is really childish because it was born out of ignorance. Only children should be childish. It's pathetic for adults to be childish. It's also far more pathetic to hold oneself as adult and publicly call others as childish in a public forum. True adults don't publicly regard themselves as adults and disdainfully (no matter artfully) clamor that other adults are children. Only pathetic hypocrites and covertly aggressive folks would do that behind a veneer of respectability.

The three obstacles to mental development: greed, anger, and delusion.
The three realms of consciousness: desire, form, and formlessness.
The three time periods: past, present, and future.
The three incarnations which are linked with the three realms of consciousness and the three time periods: pre-birth, birth, and death.

Truth/Dharma vibrates with realities of impermanence/emptiness/and no self. Suffering arises from ignorance of truth.

True Love is the cessation of concern with one's self while cultivating the identification with the Other.

After Love, maybe Knowledge/Truth/Dharma is the only other thing worth pursuing. Power, Fame, and Wealth are concerns of monkeys, not true humans.

Deception of others is understandable, but self-deception is despicable and a sign of weakness and cowardice. Physical bravery is good, emotional and intellectual bravery are even better. Life is not worth living if lived in the shadow of ignorance and cowardice.

Wissai
March 23, 2013

Chinua Achebe

Stephanie McCrummen, Adam Bernstein from Washington Post
Friday, Mar 22, 2013
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, essayist and poet who largely invented modern African fiction and shaped generations of writers worldwide, foremost with his groundbreaking book “Things Fall Apart,” died March 21 in Boston. He was 82.

The death was announced by Brown University in Providence, R.I., where Mr. Achebe had been a professor of Africanastudies since 2009. No cause was reported. Mr. Achebe made his home in the United States since 1990 following injuries from a car crash in Lagos that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

With singular mastery and poetry, Mr. Achebe attempted to describe what he knew: the struggle of his fellow Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria to adjust to the British colonialism eroding their way of life. The theme of conflict between traditional values and modern culture would define his work.

After many African countries such as Nigeria gained independence in the post-World War II years, Mr. Achebe used books such as “A Man of the People” (1966) to satirize the despots and corrupt bureaucrats who filled the gap and failed their own people. His 1983 polemic “The Trouble With Nigeria” (1983) judged that “Nigerians are what they are only because their leaders are not what they should be.”

In a literary and academic career spanning six decades and three continents, Mr. Achebe’s seminal book was his first, “Things Fall Apart” (1958), which has sold millions of copies in 45 languages and has become a staple of college reading lists.

Taking its title from a line in William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” “Things Fall Apart” was a monumental rebuke to the Western tradition of portraying Africans as savages and whites as noble. Its hero, Okonkwo, is a champion wrestler and brave leader in a fictional Nigerian village who is unable to bend to the culture introduced by British colonizers and missionaries.

His inability to assimilate ultimately leads to his suicide, a fate that results from Okonkwo’s own failings as well as the insidiousness of colonialism. Mr. Achebe considered the tragic ending “almost inevitable,” and also the beginning of the story of post-colonial Nigeria (which began in 1960).

The novel won moderate praise from Western literary critics but was eventually considered among the most important works of 20th-century fiction, lauded by writers as diverse as Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz. Morrison said she found the work liberating, once telling the Guardian newspaper: “He inhabited his world in a way that I didn’t inhabit mine — the things he could take for granted — insisting on writing outside the white gaze, not against it.”

Former South African president Nelson Mandela, long jailed during apartheid, once said he drew strength from Mr. Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.” He added, “Both of us, in our differing circumstances within the context of white domination of our continent, became freedom fighters.”

Mr. Achebe won literary awards throughout his career, including the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2007. The Nobel Prize — awarded in 1986 to a friend, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka — eluded him.

Mr. Achebe’s early success enabled him to devote considerable energy to championing the work of other African writers when he became editor of the British publisher Heinemann’s African Writers Series, a post he held for some 20 years from the early 1960s.

“First of all, he is Africa’s greatest novelist, there is no question about that,” said Charles R. Larson, an emeritus professor at American University and a leading scholar of African literature. “He shaped the vision of Africa in the world by the books he accepted for this African Writers Series. There is no writer on any continent who has had so much of an influence on the writing of one continent.”

The fifth of six children, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Igbo village. The country was then under British colonial rule, and his father became one of the village’s earliest converts to Christianity, although much of his extended family remained steeped in Igbo traditions and stories.

Mr. Achebe would later describe the tension between the Christians and those Igbo who did not adopt the religion.

“We were called in our language ‘the people of the church,’ ” Mr. Achebe once wrote, “and we called the others — with the conceit appropriate to followers of a higher religion — ‘the people of nothing.’ ”

He attended University College at Ibadan, then worked for the Ni-ger-ian Broadcasting Co. in Lagos. In his schooling and free time, he devoured books from the Western literary tradition: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickens and Conrad, among others. He adored Yeats, whom he described as a “wild Irishman” whose poetry had a kind of magic that he said reminded him of fantastical Igbo stories.

He gradually came to feel a strong disillusionment with the Western canon for its portrayal of Africans. The turning point was reading “Mister Johnson,” a novel by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary that depicted “an embarrassing nitwit” of a Ni-ger-ian protagonist. The book won great praise among Western critics.

“This book was not talking about a vague place called Africa but about southern Nigeria,” he told the Guardian in 2000. “I said, ‘Wait, that means here; this is our story.’ It brought the whole thing home to me. This story is not true, so is it possible the others are not either? It opened up a new way of looking at literature.”

His revenge was “Things Fall Apart,” whose lead character Okonkwo was as sensitive and brave as Cary’s “Mister Johnson” had been a buffoon. By that time, Mr. Achebe had dropped his Christian name, Albert, which he called a “tribute to Victorian England.”

In 1961 he married the former Christiana Chinwe Okoli. They had four children, one of whom Chinelo, became a writer. Complete information on survivors could not be learned.

Mr. Achebe’s “No Longer at Ease” (1960) was a sequel to “Things Fall Apart,” and his subsequent books included “Arrow of God” (1964), in which a Ni-ger-ian priest wedded to his traditional beliefs sets in motion a tragic collision with British authorities.

In 1966, political chaos erupted in Nigeria when Igbo army officers staged a coup, killing the prime minister and other top officials. A successful counter-coup led by officers from the mostly Muslim northern region helped ignite what would soon become a bloody and protracted civil war, including the attempted succession of the Igbo into a new country calling itself the Republic of Biafra.

Mr. Achebe’s novel “A Man of the People,” whose plot involved a coup, had seemingly anticipated the civil war and led to charges by government officials that the writer had somehow been complicit.

His home was bombed, and one of his best friends, poet Christopher Okigbo, was killed. Mr. Achebe and his family went into hiding in Biafra.

“Suddenly it occurred to me that I was living abroad; I was not at home,” he told The Washington Post in 1968. “This was a great shock. We had thought we were in our own nation. We knew there were problems but we thought they were the problems of growing up, problems that would be solved.”

After Ni-ger-ian forces crushed the rebellion in 1970, Mr. Achebe continued to pour out fiction, poetry collections and essays and began a series of lecturing jobs in the United States. He stayed away from Nigeria for long stretches in the hope that a civilian government would return to power.

Abroad, he found himself a cause celebre in an era when black authors were beginning to find greater mainstream acceptance. In a 1975 lecture on “Heart of Darkness,” he famously berated author Joseph Conrad as a “thoroughgoing racist.”

At least one professor in the audience stormed off. In a later essay, “An Image of Africa,” Mr. Achebe explained that he saw in Conrad a “perverse arrogance. . . . Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its tooth.”

In 1987, Mr. Achebe made a celebrated literary return with his fifth novel, “Anthills of the Savannah” (1987), set during a military dictatorship and concerning the nature of propaganda and moral compromise. “Anthills” was shortlisted for the Booker prize.

After the serious car accident in 1990, he taught at Bard College in upstate New York. He returned fleetingly to his homeland after the 1999 election of a new civilian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler. He told a reporter he found Lagos “confusing and very depressing,” a place where only after a bitter argument could he obtain a wheelchair to get off the airplane.

Only in his long-form writing about Nigeria did he express a kindling of hope. As a character says in “Anthills of the Savannah,” “Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind.”

Achebe

In his first novel and masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart” (1958), Mr. Achebe, who died on Thursday at 82, did exactly that. In calm and exacting prose, he examined a tribal society fracturing under the abuses of colonialism. The novel has been assigned to generations of American high school and college students — my college dispatched a copy to me before my freshman year.

In many respects “Things Fall Apart” is the “To Kill A Mockingbird” of African literature: accessible but stinging, its layers peeling over the course of multiple readings.

“Things Fall Apart,” its title taken from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” has sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into some 45 languages. Time magazine placed it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a stoic clan leader and former wrestling hero who returns to his village after seven years in exile. (He’d been sent away after his role in an accidental death.) The changes that Christian missionaries and other white men have brought are intolerable to him. “Things Fall Apart” rolls toward a bleak denouement.

What sticks with you about the novel is its sensitive investigation, often through folk tales, of how culture functions and what it means. Mr. Achebe (his name is pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) had plenty to say about notions of traditional masculinity, as well, not to mention his braided observations about nature, religion, myth, gender and history.

The novelist grabbed the subject of colonialism “so firmly and fairly,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker in the 1970s, “that the book’s tragedy, like Greek tragedy, felt tonic; a space had been cleared, an understanding had been achieved, a new beginning was implied.”

Growing up in Nigeria, Mr. Achebe attended schools that were modeled upon British public schools. In his recent book of essays, “The Education of a British-Protected Child” (2009), he was eloquent about what it felt like as a young man to read classic English novels. They provided a cognitive dissonance he had to work through.

“I did not see myself as an African in those books,” he wrote. “I took sides with the white men against the savages.” He continued: “The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.”

Mr. Achebe grew up, and grew wiser: “These writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

Mr. Achebe was a poet, professor, short-story writer and critic in addition to being a novelist. His more than 30 other books include the novels “No Longer At Ease” (1960) and “Anthills of the Savannah” (1987). He published several children’s books. He was also the author, controversially, of an essay called “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ ”

While many critics defended Conrad, Mr. Achebe didn’t back down from his assertion that the racism in Conrad was not merely the norm for its time. In a book of essays he quoted earlier writers who, he said, were less backward.

Mr. Achebe was a mentor and role model to a generation of African writers — he’s often referred to as the father of modern African writing. But like many novelists who find success with an early book, Mr. Achebe found himself almost solely defined by “Things Fall Apart.” He spent the last two decades in the United States, teaching at Bard College and then Brown University.

It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of Mr. Achebe’s pioneering and canonical novel; it no longer seems to stand, to a Western audience at any rate, for African writing as a whole. His talent and success have helped spawn an array of postcolonial writing from across the continent. Among the talented young Nigerian writers alone who cite him as an influence are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Lola Shoneyin.

In 1990 Mr. Achebe was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in Nigeria. The following year he gave an interview to Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions magazine.

Mr. Morrow asked him about the accident, and Mr. Achebe spoke about it with stoicism and good humor. “Children are born deformed,” he said. “What crime did they commit? I’ve been very lucky. I walked for 60 years. So what does it matter that I can’t for my last few years. There are people who never walked at all.”

“Things Fall Apart” is, at base, about the strength that human beings find in community. His car accident offered him similar lessons. “It is an opportunity,” Mr. Achebe told Mr. Morrow. “It’s a lesson. It’s so much. It is an enrichment. I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned how much we depend on each other.”

Dwight Garner from NYTimes 3/23/2013

To be or not to be in the world?

-Master, I want to be a bodhisattva.
-How's so?
-I don't know, I just want not to be far
from understanding the meaning of life
-And what do you think the meaning of life is?
-Love and compassion of others and peace.
-Then you must get rid of false pride and inner strife.
To lord over others is easy,
All you need is to find folks not as "good" as you.
But to be a bodhisattva, you've got to be a master of your ego
And yet remember this world is filled with too
many stupid, stubborn, and uneducated assholes
who are no better than animals and have no souls.
Faced with that conundrum, what do you want to do?
Still want to be loving and a bodhisattva?
Or would you rather be alone and work on things that turn you on?
You see, recently a woman asked me
If I wanted be in this world for her.
How could I answer
When I don't know if I still want to stay
In this temple or come back to the world
And interact daily with assoles and scumbags
So my true nature would be unfurled
Because you see, as humans we tend
To have an inflated sense of ourselves.
Only by dealing with scums and bums
Would we know exactly where we stand
Staying in the temple shields us from the world
And makes us numb and dumb.

Wissai
March 22, 2013

Death, Love, and Enlightenment

They say Death is an equalizer. It's not so much how we die as how we live. Your concubine's sister is a miser and she's dying a horror-filled death. You have personally witnessed many human deaths up close and personal. All of those people vainly tried to fight the invincible General Omni F. (stands for Final, not Fucking) Death. The General mowed all of them down despite their and their loved ones' cries and entreaties. He had an impassive and bored look on his face. He couldn't be placated.

Death is a finality and an equalizer
Whereas Love is seldom between equals and is never a finality.
Once the heart is really moved, it knows no boundary;
Recognizes no limits on space, no limitations on time.

Yes, though I no longer love you
The feeling, the sensation of knowing of what love is
Stays with me until the time for me to die
There were so many times I cried
For what I knew to be peace and bliss
To know you and then to love you
Helped me find out who I really am
Of course after you went away I am no longer the same
Now I think I am wiser and recognize
Love for what it really is
In its essence love is nothing but a game
Played with words, sighs, and lies
The winner is the one who is a cynic
A sentimental guy like me would only get sick
And tries to heal himself through words of poetry

You must understand that it's not easy to write poetry. To express the inexpressible, the poet falls back on poetic license where literary conceits (look up a big dictionary for meanings of "conceits" other than "arrogance"), exaggerations, and rhyme scheme influence his choice of words. Love is, of course, not a game as commonly understood. To understand me, you must go beyond words, beyond silence, beyond almost everything, except life itself. I am like life with all of its myriad manifestations and seeming contradictions. I am more than what it meets the eye. Everybody sees themselves in PART of me. Of course, they think they understand me but the reality is they are subsumed within me.

Further, you need to digest Chapter 76 of Lankavatara Sutra where the distinction and link between meaning and language is discussed. A very profound and subtle distinction. It is all linked to the insight that truth is ineffable:

"Fools say that words and meaning are not separate. These benighted fools do not understand the nature of words. Words come and go. Meaning does not. Words are subject to birth and death. Meaning is not."

Words, like the boat used in crossing the river of ignorance, are only the tool and not the objective itself. Once you reach the shore of understanding, you don't need the boat anymore. You discard the boat. You don't carry the boat on your head once you already get to the shore of the only river of ignorance on the planet of illusions and delusions. Similarly you need words of teaching to get the meaning of life. Once you understand the meaning, you don't need the words anymore. All the religious fools have an error in having the attachment to words (read: scriptures, Bible, Koran, Talmud, etc...). Form is for fools. Wise men go for the essence.

I am closest to understanding than most humans you know. All my actions and words are manifestations of excess which I use in understanding essence, hence attaining freedom and liberation. I only learn via excess. People look at my flirtation with excess and mistakenly believe that excess is me. Little do they know I use excess as a tool.

HỒN THƠ

HỒN THƠ

ARS POETICA…between the dark and the void
Pablo Neruda

giửa bóng tối và hư vô bất tận
nửa tiết trinh và dư ảnh bình minh
ao ước nghẹn góc tâm linh chân tịnh
khát khao chăng chỉ nhung nhớ ngàn năm

gương hoen tối mùi phong rêu trong trắng
hoa không hoa gió trượt ngã lòng sa
thân ướp lạnh giường đêm xưa kê vắng
em không em mà tất cả đời ta

hồn thơ dại vụng về bên nắng mới
lời không lời mà sao mọc chơi vơi
ta hỏi lại em từ đâu bỗng tới
mà hồn nhiên đem tia sáng vào đời

lòng thế kỷ mong manh từng nguyện vọng
mưa hơi mưa giọt đọng cuối triền miên
em quay lại đường về mây còn mỏng
nước còn đây chỉ vắng vợi người hiền

Lưu Nguyễn Đạt
Đất Trinh, March 19, 2013

Ars Poetica

Between the dark and the endless void
Exist half the virginity and the lingering dawn
The suffocating wish of a piece of the soul at peace
The yearning miss that is a thousand years old

Stained dusty mirror and the musty smell of unspoiled moss
Winds slip and slide on flowers that look like no others
Icy body lie in bed in a deserted night
You unlike others occupy my whole life

Crazy, clumsy lines of verse arrive in new sunshine
Words like no others rise like lost stars in the sky
I ask you again where you came from
And brought with you rays of sun into my life

My fragile desire that goes on for a century
Mists of rain condense into eternity
You turn back onto a road where clouds still not thick
Water is still here waiting for a kind-hearted soul

Translated by Wissai
March 20, 2013

Primal Scream

Unlike Arthur Janov's assertion, the scream is not necessarily therapeutic. It's far better to stay calm at all times.

If you feel a wrong has been done to you, ask yourself if it's justified. If it is, then accept it and move on. If it is not, find out if it's intentional. If it is, ask yourself if you can live with it. If not, then find ways to punish the bastard, even if it takes 1,000 years.

And if you think a wrong has been done by you to other(s) in ignorance or arrogance, apology and amends should be promptly issued.

There's no need to scream your head off. It does you no good. In fact, it weakens you and degrades you. All it serves is to show others that you are weak and lack self-control. It is not even therapeutic as you think. This world is full of screaming creatures already. Your voice is weak. You can't outscream the monkeys and the animals in both arboreal and urban jungles.

So breathe in and breathe out and say softly to the monkey, "you have a 'point' there" and then you walk away. You didn't say he had a good or wrong point so you didn't lie, didn't compromise your integrity.

How come you know so much about the dynamics of screaming? You used to scream a lot yourself. Many of your words have an empirical flavor and touch and sound. You hate lying and empty pontificating. You do try to rise above cacophony. You are aware that in a demonstration crowd, beneath and hidden in the primal scream and rage are the euphoria and the release, but not necessarily the wisdom and the truth.

The same for the ardent expression of love may indicate more a self-oriented love for the declarer than an affection for the beloved. True, passionate love is often quiet and patient, not noisy and urgent. Deep love is acceptance and forgiveness, not keeping score and demanding reciprocity. True love knows about peace and serenity, not tumult and anxiety. If by loving somebody, you experience peace and strength, not disturbance over your helplessness under the charm of your beloved, then maybe you really understand what love means. Love does not need any primal cry of affection. It is manifested by the quiet display of tenderness and support.

Many, many years ago, you once told a woman that your affection for her made you feel strong. She strangely responded by running away from you. You watched her run away, with serenity and pity and bemusement in your heart. You didn't feel the registration of anger in your consciousness. Your love for her was not meant to be. It was not what it was not. Such was life. Life went on and it did. Screaming would not change the situation. Running after her would just degrade you. It could be that it was she, not you, who was missing a golden opportunity to grow and be happy with the beloved. Love and Ego are mutually exclusive. Ego dissolves in Love, not the other way around.

Ego is a dangerous double-edged sword. Some humans wisely use it to improve their minds; most, however, blindly and reflexively cover their sense of insecurity and inadequacy by lies, denials, and distortions in the name of trying to even the hurt. True pride is different from Ego.

Primal Therapy, Neurosis, Truths, and Adjustments

Primal Therapy, Neurosis, Truths, and Adjustments

Our lives are nothing but a series of adjustments/responses to external stimuli. Our thoughts are encapsulated, distilled summaries and consciousness of those adjustments/responses. We are but the sum of our experiences and our responses to the experiences.

Each psychotherapy is an approach, a technique, a theoretical framework to view the experience and our adjusting process /response to the experiences, and finally to come up with a suggestion to evaluate the success or lack thereof of the adjusting process. Life is a series of challenges and adjustments/question and answers/stimuli and responses. We are not the only organism doing this. The measure of our success or not lies in the longevity of our existence and our feeling of happiness or not regarding such an existence.

We cannot run away from ourselves/cannot really practice self-deception. Our conscience and our own consciousness of our feelings would tell us what kind of life we have.

Primal therapy is founded by a high school dropout who was discovered by the Army during the IQ testing that the kid had exceptional intelligence. The kid was encouraged to pursue higher education. He responded well to the encouragement and became very cocksure in his insistence that his therapy is the only one that is relevant in the field of psychotherapy. His therapy was a sensation in the 1970's and the phrase "primal scream" has become part of the the vocabulary of the English language. The therapy is past its heyday and the founder has been viewed as extremely arrogant and unyielding. Some critics have opined Janov's original humble academic performance as a teenager has led him to overcompensate for the vaunted view of his analysis of the cause of neurosis.

My own eclectic reading, romantic journeys, sensitive make-up, and penchant for solitude have led me to be more aware than most humans of the whole dynamics of knowledge acquisition about oneself and the people on this planet. I have time and again encountered instances that I am different than most humans: more honest intellectually. The reason could be that I am used to emotional pain. Denial is a coping response in pain avoidance. Most humans are cowards, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. I am not.

I just did some reading about IQ and the meaning of the score of 135 for me and 140 for my son, and its implications for my interest in language acquisition and written expression of my thoughts.

It is very easy to find out how we score on an IQ test. All we need to do is to get on the Net and spend 20 minutes or so on a test.

My latest analysis of human condition and the reason why I hold most of them in contempt: monkeys revel in mediocrities and commonalities yet they often wear them as badges of honor and distinction. They think it is noble to lust after power, fame, and glory. I am no monkey. I hanker and hunger for enduring veracities: honor, love, knowledge, beauty, arts, justice, peace, and freedom.

Wissai
March 18, 2013

Hello, it's me

Hello, it's me

Life is full of excitement and fun if you (that means me and everybody else who wants to be like me!) really know how to see and think. Your "dialogues" with the two nitwits were actually a lot of fun. You were serious, somber, rhetorical, and sarcastic while they frantically looked for any cheap shots at you and unwittingly revealed their ignorance and stupidity.

Where you live the weather is in full spring. Trees start getting green again, with buds shooting out in a hurry and the temperature is warm and the air is fresh. And you feel hot blood coursing through your veins and happy. You had your body fat content measured yesterday. It was 23%. The health club clerk told you it was very good for the person of your age, height, and weight. She was even flirting with you a bit after learning about your age. She demanded to see your ID and asked you about your marital status. You told her you were married for the tenth time and was looking for number 11 to fill up your harem. She raised her eyebrows and squealed, " for real?" Some women are delightfully gullible. But wait a minute, it could be you who were and are still gullible. Wasn't her squealing a tad much on the high note and her eyes seemed to bore straight at yours for any detection of lying and bullshitting? She could just play at you after noticing your 2012 Maserati GranTurismo in the parking lot and your furtive glances at her oversize knockers. But you tell yourself you can handle her. You now regard yourself quite worldly and "sophisticated" after a rash of unpleasant experiences with women. You are no longer naive and trusting.

The euphoria generated by the good news about your body fat content and the brief flirting with the health clerk promptly dissipated after two distasteful email messages appeared in your inbox. Monkeys, especially the cowardly power-hungry, self-righteous, commie ass-kissing, and self-important ones, love to strut around with their prehensile tails raised high revealing their ugly reddish posteriors. Little did they know by doing so they just lower themselves in your eyes and enter your little black book.

Self-righteous, self-important Vietnamese folks are everywhere
I can smell them in the air
Winds carry their scent from afar
Los Angeles, D.C, and even Auckland in New Zealand
They think they're respectable
But in my book they're execrable
And nothing but a bunch of commie ass-kissing cowards
I wonder if they ever feel in their hearts
The beauty and bravery of the following quivering words
Spoken with fiery determination and passion-imparted:
"Let's go, you and I together, even in fetters or tarred with feathers
To the public square, with our wounded hearts and pride,
Showing the world we have no fear of death
And in the name of freedom and dignity to our last breath we cry
Come, my friends and countrymen, let's go!"

You just took another good look at yourself in the mirror and boy, did you look good! The exercise, the meditation, and the diet are having positive results. No wonder Yvette keeps saying, "Roberto, you're so damn sexy these days. What's the secret? Please tell me."

You know Yvette is lusting after and salivating at you, but you will never yield to her relentless flirting. The woman is too cheap, too sanctimonious to your liking. The meditations and readings about Buddhist teachings help you keep things in perspective. This gorgeous body of yours is slowly disintegrating. You will finally look old and decrepit and your Johnny will not be able to rise up and salute the sun in the morning. You're preparing yourself for that day.

Two nights later, you got some of the equilibrium back after a free spendid dinner, replete with quail, Alaska King crab legs, salmon, filet mignon, wine and fine dessert, at the courtesy of Yvette. She later asked you if you wanted to help her draft a will over coffee at her house in Summerlin. You replied that you only had two years of law school and would not do proper justice to the task. She laughed, saying, " Don't be silly. We'll just do the preliminary work.Of course the lawyer will finetune the details. Let's go. Just leave your car here. It will be fine with casino valet, right? Even if it's a Maserati."

Her car was no slouch itself, a 2010 E350 Mercedes, running smooth as silk, purring through the streets in a Sunday night. We passed through a gate after the security guard waved her through.

You supposed Yvette was trying to impress me with her wealth since you didn't appear to be overly impressed by her looks and personality. You had known her for a year at a poker table. Her ex-husband was a former American colonel in U.S. military intelligence. He dumped her for another Vietnamese. Yvette used to own a jewelry store. She was used to living quite high on the hog, but she was not really generous. Her seeming generosity always covered up a calculation. She was attracted to you right away as she was lonely and you were good at talking with lonely women. When she first met you, you just arrived in town, after getting a fifth divorce after being married for five years. There was no children with the woman, one good thing for you. The divorce cost you a tidy sum, though not as grand as some of the others. You rented a room with a symbolic rent from a high-rise condo from Omar, college friend who did good in the stock market and other business ventures. He constantly travelled, leaving the Maserati with you to take care of. You told Yvette the whole story about the Maserati, explaining to her that you were only its caretaker, not the owner. Omar was in Argentina, tidying up some inheritance from his aunt.

After you helped her draft the will (Yvette's net worth totaled only around $2 million. She left much of it to her only child, a married woman with three kids. With the way she was gambling, she would be lucky to be left with $100,000 within 3 years), she and you shot the breeze. You then brought up the emails. She was furious with the email writers. She said, "Screw them, Roberto. Who did the motherfuckers think who they were? You did the right thing. You are too good a man to associate with assholes like them. Stay away from them. And fuck the one who gave you the cheap shot. What's the motherfucker's name again? Do you want me to do something about it?" You laughed out loud, reaching for Yvette's hands, squeezed them and said softly said to her "What are you gonna do? Cuss them to death?" You knew Yvette. She loved theatrical and grandiose gestures. In her heart, she was an opera actress, resplendent in all times with bygone era costumes and taken away by her singing and accompanied music. "By the way, thanks for a provision in your will. I don't think I will live long enough to enjoy it." " You're welcome, dear. You never thought I cared about you, right?". By now, she was in your arms, resting her head against your chest.

You did not love Yvette. You only felt lonely and disturbed by the emails. Heck, you were human. You had feelings. You were a fiction writer and a poet, albeit mediocre and unpublished. You were touched by Yvette's seeming caring gestures. Then incongruously you recalled a news article about Captain Peter Linnerooth and you felt strong and recharged and you saw the motherfuckers for who they were: a surge of contempt swept over your body and soul. You got up, saying, "I've got to go. Got to get some sleep. Thanks for everything. I really do." "But you can get sleep here", Yvette weakly protested. You smiled, and tenderly said to her, "No, I couldn't. Too early. But thanks. Be careful. See you later. I could take a cab back."

The night was pleasant. It was not cold. The air was fresh. Stars twinkled and scintillated up high. Things purred and rumbled down below. You felt strong and whole. You would move on and up. There was money to be made, your body to be taken care of, poems to be written, and books to be read. This life, this only life offered to you, was good. You were blessed for having a mind and a heart. Maybe you would give it a try and see how Yvette would look without any clothes on the next time out with her.

Hello, it's me. Life's great. It's all a very short game. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Wissai
March 18, 2018

Running

Running

I took up running once and haven't stopped
I first ran away from her and then from myself
Now I run into obduracy and stupidity
I didn't know some dudes were beyond hope

They are too proud to admit
They're dumb and very stupid
The more they flail around defending themselves
The dumber they look

But I guess they're too stupid to realize that
Because they're still talking and pontificating
Even after getting hit over the head by a verbal bat
The dudes are far from interesting

They're just a bunch of loud-mouthed ignorant bastards
Who mistakenly take persistence as a virtue
They must have inhaled a can of the gas of mustard
They keep arguing until their faces turn blue

Now I'm running away from the intellectual lepers
I'm tired of imparting knowledge and teaching them manners
They're too stupid to learn
Too proud to admit they're ignorant.

Wissai
March 13, 2013

Feng Shui

According to Zangshu,
The Burial Book of the Han Dynasty
The qi that rides the wind
Stops at water boundary
So this is here I'm going to bury you
On this river bank, not far away from town
The qi will keep your spirit renewed
And night and day you're in the company of river sound
Lie down swwet, like down still
You're protected from the burning sun
Under this tree on the hill
Even in dearh, you're well cared for, my beautiful nun

Wissai
March10, 2013

How to rebuild Vietnam and fight off invaders

There is nothing wrong to be in the "Quoc Gia" camp---I consider myself part of the camp, but I strongly disagree with the uncompromising attitude and the barnyard language and the calling for blood of the VCP leaders and their followers by some vociferous and stupidly self-righteous people of the Quoc Gia camp. To win over the hearts ands mind of all the Vietnamese populace, the Quoc Gia camp must present themselves as pragmatic problem solvers and people with compassion and forgiveness in their hearts, and not bloodthirsty and vengeful ideologues, otherwise they unwittingly pose themselves that they are no better than their commie counterpart ideologues. A winning solution is never regarding and painting the opposing camp as uncompromising and evil enemies, otherwise the opposing camp, out of induced paranoia, will in turn be uncompromising and fight to the death defending their lives and interests.

We must remember our true enemies are not Vietnamese, no matter what stripe of ideology they choose to wear. Our enemies must always be external, especially the Chinese and the Cambodians who have killed us in the past and bent on taking our lands. If the Vietnamese people keep regarding one another as enemies and constantly and persistently demand blood as a payment for past sins, such a people cannot last long as an independent, sovereign people. All civil wars are bad, no matter how it is painted. There are more than enough civil wars in our history. It's time for us to grow up in view of the looming danger of being conquered and assimilated by the Chinese, this time once and for all. Just because we succeeded in escaping assimilation in the past, that does not necessarily mean this time we also will, in view of the advances of technology and the pressures of demographics.

To state there are some, if not many, stupid and unenlightened folks in the Quoc Gia camp may not necessarily involve ad hominem attacks. It is what it is, whitewashing does not get rid of realities. There are indeed folks in the Quoc Gia camp, who are mặc cảm, chụp mũ, and ngụy biện who best serve as unthinking, petty, small followers, and never as leaders or spokesmen in any capacity as they don't have the brains and wisdom to act as leaders or spokesmen, regardless of how their wanton ambition tells them otherwise.

Roberto Wissai/NKBa'

The next pope should be a mystic

The next pope should be a mystic

By Timothy Shriver, Published: February 28, 2013

Timothy Shriver is the chairman of Special Olympics.

There’s no need to rehash the recent disastrous track record of the all-male Roman Catholic hierarchy. The sordid abuse of children by priests, the sinister coverups, the callous treatment of nuns, the deaf ear turned toward Catholics who happen to be gay or divorced — it’s all on the front page. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging moral authority.

What’s much more devastating is that it is losing believers, too. If you can’t trust the messengers, why trust the message? It is not too much to say that the crisis in the church is contributing to a crisis of faith in the Gospel itself.

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This is a crisis not of management nor of theology. This is a crisis of the spirit. But before the church can address its great moral collapse, it will have to recover its spiritual bearings. The next pope should be a mystic.

A mystic? Absolutely! Contrary to popular perception, a mystic is not a magician or a crystal-ball-gazer. A mystic is rather a person who has had an experience of God’s love so unmistakable that it changes him or her forever, imparting a confidence that cannot be shaken, a humility that cannot be doubted, a freedom that exudes love and gentleness and authenticity. A mystic knows from experience, not books, that we are each beautiful beyond our understanding, loved beyond our capacity to love, united beyond our perceptions of difference and division.

Happily, mystics have a rich history in the Catholic tradition. I’d like to see a pope who is a devoted follower of the anonymous 13th-century author of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” who taught the practice of silent prayer and meditation. Like many contemporary teachers of meditation, this person taught students to enter meditation meekly through a “cloud of forgetting” and discover a state in which “the soul is one with God.” Today’s millions who are disillusioned with metaphysical formulations or religious creeds would love an invitation to that experience.

It would also be wonderful if the new pope led retreats based on the teachings of Saint Theresa of Avila, who wrote that “any real ecstasy is a sign you are moving in the right direction. Don’t let any prude tell you otherwise!” The future of the church depends on its capacity to embrace the healthy and wonderful human longing for love and unity and intimacy. Theresa could be the model who celebrated the love of Christ as a lover would, a pioneer who believed that, through the practice of loving God, we can become better lovers of other human beings.

The new pope could update his iPod with the enchanting sacred music composed by Hildegard of Bingen — a 12th-century hermit who longed to become a “feather on the breath of God.” We live in search of experiences of “flow,” where our identity is swallowed up in a unifying consciousness not all our own. Hildegard would be a wonderful guide in the search for that lightness of being, and her music could illuminate our search.

The new pope might also remind believers of the often painful detachment that comes with the mystical pursuit of the purest love of God. He need only teach the writings of Saint John of the Cross, who found himself “living darkly, with no ray of light.” John is a voice for those who feel the void of meaninglessness, but in that same darkness, he is also given the discovery that often comes with spiritual rigor: “[L]ove gives power to my life . . . . Love can perform a wondrous labor which I have learned internally, and all the good or bad in me takes on a penetrating savor, changing my soul so it can be consumed in a delicious flame.”

Today’s searchers can also look to modern-day mystics. American Franciscan Richard Rohr offers guidance about how to seek a heart at peace with others and infused with purpose. Rohr teaches the mysticism of Saint Francis, mysticism as part of everyday life. Rohr reminds us that the Gospel is like the gay rights movement in one way: It’s an invitation for us to come out of our closets and bask in the reckless love of God.

Can a pope be like Saint Francis or Saint Theresa?

It depends on how much the cardinals are willing to risk. They should risk it all, just like Jesus.

Theirs is a church founded on the audacious premise that “God is love.” Jesus trusted that love to enable him to take the greatest risks possible: to love his enemies, to believe that God’s presence was in all things, to teach poverty and humility and the beauty of children and flowers and meekness and peace. It was that depth of spirit that allowed him to say, “[God] the Father and I are one.”

We need a pope like him, a mystic for our times. Nothing less than a mystic can reveal the depth of the beauty of the church to a new generation of seekers, still hungry to believe, still ready to fall in love with God.

More on this topic:

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Pope Benedict’s legacy