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March 20, 2008FREE TIBET!CHINA! ONCE AND FOR ALLFOR THE LOVE OF GODWILL YOU PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FREE TIBET!
WE’VE ONLY BEEN ASKING SINCE 1950The sweet little pink stucco cottage I used to own in west Berkeley was on the high-traffic corner of Dwight Way and Curtis Street. Cars and lots of ‘em headed west to San Pablo Ave., or east to downtown, people got on or off at the No. 9 bus stop there, or halted to be appalled by the side yard I couldn’t afford to have maintained and was too lazy or tired to weed-whack myself. I had the above sticker in the charming arched window looking out on my overgrown lawn, just above the man-in-the-moon lamp that cast a welcoming golden glow on passers-by. Add the serpentine plume of smoke wafting over the roof, into my sheltering pine and the starry sky, from my conversation-piece corner fireplace of petrified wood and encrusted marbles, and you have a pretty good picture of the complete boredom that drove me out of Berkeley to The City. After a while it got around to me that to the surrounding neighborhood my place was known as “the Free Tibet house.” And that’s how I still think of it. SEE THAT AP ITEM?International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge affirmed, from his cabana in St. Kitts, with an umbrella’ed drink in his hand [author’s dramatization], the official policy against boycotts of the Olympics, because political actions only hurt “innocent athletes and [stop] the organization from something that definitely is worthwhile organizing.” I think English is his second language.“On a six-day tour of the Caribbean,” wrote Clive Bacchus, “Rogge expressed condolences for the [Tibetan] victims and said he hopes calm will be restored immediately. He declined to say whether the committee would change its stance if violence continues or more people are killed.” Apparently the amount of people already killed is acceptable for the time being. Let’s just see what happens! What is the magic number, I wonder? Varying reports from varying sources range from eight to 100 victims, including nuns, monks, and children. IOC vice president Thomas Bach said “the committee will speak with China” about human rights and condemned the crackdown, wagging their fingers the whole time and saying “every use of violence is a step backwards but a boycott would be the wrong way because that will cut lines of communication.” The IOC issued a statement that [they share] “the world’s desire for a peaceful resolution to the tensions of past days in the Tibetan region of China. We hope that calm can return to the region as quickly as possible.” Bach is recognizing occupied Tibet as a “Chinese region.” Tibet has been involuntarily occupied for a half-century and more! Should we then consider Iraq an “American region”? Returning calm to “the region” as quickly as possible would entail returning the country of Tibet to the people of Tibet. WHAT WIMPS.I don’t care what China said or promised to get the Games, they should never have even been considered. OK, good for Stephen Spielberg for canceling his post as Artistic Advisor. But he should never have offered himself up to begin with. With China’s record of human rights abuses—support for Darfur, Tiananman Square (the Chinese name for which, Yiheyuan, by the way, means “garden of restful peace”), the Falun Gong and now the “crackdown”—who would want to align themselves with them in the spirit of international gamesmanship?It’s been a long-time plan of mine, which may take effect this fall, to take the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Beijing. But can I allow myself to patronize Beijing, to leave my tourist dollars there? I could simply bypass China and go straight to Vladiovostok, but I’m the kind of traveler who likes to take side trips—for instance, to the Grand Canyon from Los Angeles, from Chicago to Philadelphia by way of New Orleans—while I’m “in the neighborhood.” In fact, after I sell my flat I plan to visit a friend in Sweden, and thought I might as well do the Trans-Siberian while I’m in the neighborhood. Can I get so close to China, perhaps for the only time in my life, without laying eyes on this amazing land of history and legend? And can I take the Trans-Siberian and deny myself the Trans-Manchurian and the Trans-Mongolian—as long as I’m in the neighborhood, you understand! I don’t yet know. I may look upon it as a journalistic expedition. But I will never take the most expensive and luxurious train in the world, from Beijing to Lhasa, established to dump Chinese tourists into Tibet. HOWEVER,is this country any better?Just as I don’t hold “China” against Chinese citizens or Chinese-Americans, I wouldn’t want anyone to hold “America” against me. Rose Pak, of the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce said she understands “people having difficulties with China at any given time, well but the whole world have [sic] problems with the U.S. at any given time, but that doesn’t mean you advocate for disruption.”No, no let’s never ever disrupt or agitate or make any diplomat anywhere the slightest bit uncomfortable. We know how uncomfortable words can be the face of murder. Sssshhhhh! SAN FRANCISCOis set to be the only North American city the Olympic Torch passes through. Oh, man, I can’t wait to see this. Tibetan protestors want the celebration cancelled. Supervisor Chris Daly penned a resolution that whichever official accepts the torch make it “publicly known that the torch is received with alarm and protest.” I think it should be Daly (that’s gonna happen)! Mayor Newsom, for his part, can “compartmentalize” his “strong concerns” about humans right and separate them from the spirit of the Olympics. Strange, I’ve always felt more at peace having one integrated brain. But that’s my privilege. I’m not a politician. A rep for the Chinese consulate (subjected to arson Thursday morning) said that a “small handful of people are trying to take advantage of the Olympic games to fulfill their hidden schemes.” Our schemes, for instance, of halting the murder of Tibetan nuns and children, our schemes to restore sovereignity to an occupied country, to hold up signs as the torch passes, to draw attention to violent injustice. Oh, but we’re a crafty lot! GOD KNOWS, AMERICA NEEDSto, come this January, spend time healing and caring for her own, and repairing our deeply damaged world reputation, but the spotlight is glaringly on China right now, and I don’t know how China’s behavior can escape the scrutiny of the worldwide human rights community and continue on its ruthless path. Something’s gotta give. Let’s hope it’s the Chinese Communist Party. And this just in, Supervisor Carmen Chu, a Chinese woman, got out a fish knife and gutted the entrails out of Supervisor Daly’s resolution, so that he had to ask to have his name taken off it. Daly and Tom Ammiano and Jake McGoldrick, Ross Mirkarimi, bravo to you; Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu, shame on you! You have showered shame upon yourselves. I SAY ECKHART TOLLE and the DALAI LAMAshould make a joint address the UN and the OIC and perhaps the Olympic Games themselves. Did you enjoy my treatise on Tolle in “For Whom the Bell Tolles?” I graduated in 1977 and I’m still writing term papers. If I turn one person onto Tolle I’ll get my wings as an angel of peace. After all, we are all bringers of consciousness. Perhaps that’s what my writing is “about.” Though I would much rather hear Tolle talk on his own, without Oprah Winfrey underlining everything he says with a “So…you mean…OK, got it,” she’s doing a tremendous service broadcasting his ideas. Because A New Earth is about the need for world-wide transformation of humanity’s consciousness. Tolle doubts we can make it another hundred years without a widespread awakening as to how we treat the earth, each other, and, first of all, ourselves. Exactly what are Tolle’s credentials, asked someone on a message board, other than that he’s “enlightened”? YOU’RE A DRUNK, LET’S FACE IT.The man had a transformative life experience that he is able to write and speak eloquently about, that millions of people relate to and learn from. Many do find his message personally transformative. I am one of those. Or perhaps he spoke to me because he understood what I already knew without formally verbalizing it—that who I am is inalienable, whatever my life circumstances. (He was formerly a research scholar at Cambridge University.)In an old “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episode entitled “The Cream of the Jest,” fading actor Charles Hanover Gresham (the great Claude Rains) plays a desperate old alcoholic actor who can’t get parts because he’s an unreliable drunk. He explains to Broadway playwright Wayne Campbell, who has used him before, that he wants a part in his new play. But “no dice.”“You’re a drunk, let’s face it,” says Campbell. “I’ve got to get back on the stage again,” pleads Gresham, “don’t you understand that? I’m dead when I’m not doing a job of acting. You know, sometimes when I’m in my room I, I go to the mirror, and I, I look into it trying to see who I am…I talk to myself, and all the characters I’ve ever played pass in front of me, and I’m every one of them, but that’s all I am, there’s no real me, only the characters, don’t you see? Then I go back, and I sit, and I wait, I wait for somebody, somebody like you to call me, to bring me back to life again. I’m only real when I’m acting. The rest of the time I’m nothing. That’s why I drink. Don’t you see?” “You sound a little schizzy to me, boy,” says Campbell, and suggests a psychiatrist. PERHAPS SOME OF US ARE ONLY ACTING.Well, not only–not disingenuously, not on purpose, but ourselves unaware of it. Some of us get up in the morning playing the wife, or whosoever you need to be when you greet your first contact of the day. It may be true you’re someone’s wife, but it’s what you are, not who you are. And when the role collapses, when your husband without notice brings an end to 35 years of marriage, then who are you? The show has been cancelled; the curtain has come down on your major role. What’s left? You are the you you always were before you ever met your husband. PERHAPS SOME OF US ARE TRAPPEDin our own image of ourselves. I am a professor, I am a doctor, I am an elected official. Lots of these successful professionals find themselves on the psychiatrist’s couch. Somehow who they are isn’t working for them. Could they perhaps be tremendously bigger, more expansive, than anything they’d imagine they might be? Perhaps you are chained to your own idea of yourself? COME ON, TAKE IT…TAKE ANOTHER LITTLE PIECEOF MY HEART, MY WALLET, MY DIGNITY, MY SOULIn another Alfred Hitchcock presentation, “The Manacled,” a captive prisoner (con man nonpareil William Redfield), being transported wearing handcuffs and a 40-lb. “boot” by a straight-as-a-steel-ruler sergeant (Gary Merrill) to San Quentin on a train, is trying to convince him to take advantage of the $50,000 waiting for him in an old woman’s suitcase in coach, in trade for the key to that boot. The sergeant gets off clean because the prisoner is going to shoot him (flesh wound) with his own gun to make it look like they struggled with the gun before he escaped. He didn’t know whom he would draw as the patsy to his con, he explains to the stoic sergeant.“I thought whoever it was would be wearing a ready-made suit off of a basement rack, his heels would be run down; he would be the kind of man living on the installment plan. Doesn’t really own anything, just pieces of things. A piece of a cheap car, a piece of an icebox, a piece of a bedroom set, and all the stuff he has pieces of is already falling to pieces, but he’ll keep paying on it and paying, month after month, because that’s the kind of man he is—just a piece of a man.”
Amazing shot of Redfield and Merrill talking toeach other in the reflection of the train window I CONTENDthat many people live their life in pieces. For instance, in one piece you are a mother, in another you are a community leader, in another you are a person who enjoys historical fiction, in another you think secret thoughts no one would suspect, in another you jog down Terwiliger Boulevard every day, because you are proud of staying fit. In another, you are the fantasy amore of Johnny Depp. All of these various pieces add up to the whole real you, whether anyone can appreciate the totality of them or not. But these things aren’t you. Au contraire, mon soeur. They are a charade. THESE ROLES ARE REALin this world as we know it, the world we all move through; other people relate to you as you embody them—but do they know you? You know so-and-so as the chairperson of the Blah Committee, and you respond to her as such when you meet her in the grocery store—that’s her role in your life and in the community’s—but do you know her? You do have obligations and responsibilities as a mother, a wife, a pillar of the community. You are these things. In the world as we know it. WHAT HAPPENSwhen someone you know in a certain way commits suicide? “I saw him yesterday! He seemed fine!” There’s always something about seeing the person recently that implies there should never have been anything wrong in his life. But there’s obviously something more to the person than what you knew superficially in the “real” world. That person was an entity beyond his standing in your community, beyond your understanding of his role in life. He had his own reasons for things he did.One day, Silda Wall Spitzer is the Wife of the Governor of New York—what a life!; the next day she is the fucked-over sucker of the latest power-mad fucker who does what he does because he can. I wish she had not stood by him—but that is her choice, for whatever reason. Because she hasn’t yet released her role as loyal wife? Because she doesn’t like the replacement role, duped foolish blind betrayed wife of Super-Delegate-Fucker-Governor? Ms. Wall-Spitzer, who you are does not depend on who he is; it’s even completely irrelevant. You were born a You who never heard of him. Cut this loser loose! I NEVER ONCE IDENTIFIED WITH ANY JOBI ever had. I disliked telling people what I did for a living. Today I’d rather not tell them what I did. It’s irrelevant to who I am. The moment I quit my last job, I instantly became more me than I had been, in the public eye—encountering coworkers, clients, service people—in nearly a decade. You’ve seen the bumper stickers, “I’d rather be…” I’m relieved to say, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing, because whatever I do want to do and can do, I do do. Mostly, I want to be writing. I can’t help being a writer, I’ve always told myself, but it’s still not who I am. All of that, every word I’ve written, will disintegrate into stardust. When the planet explodes, in an inglorious protest against enough-is-enough, will any of that matter? No. Like a calculator that returns to zero when cleared, nothing of me will be left. It’ll be time for a new equation. BUT ALSO,I AM a writer, in real life, it’s how I spend my time on earth; I AM a daughter and a sister, I can’t deny it, but those attributes constitute my “life situation,” not my living consciousness. My living consciousness does not reflect my situation as a writer, because it is preverbal, nonverbal. It doesn’t even know “I” (egoic “real life” self) am a writer. I don’t want to return to working for other people just because the “real” me is a writer. It’s also because the “real” me, in the world as we know it, is bipolar. I can take only so much, as I have said, “of anything, of life.” I need a lot of down time, and while working full-time—about 55 hours a week devoted to preparing to, getting to, and being at my job—the down time I needed occupied the rest of my life and manifested as exhaustion. I was at work, I was at home, but I was constantly ragged and unable to give myself entirely to either, because I knew that my role as an office manager was a fake, that it wasn’t what would make my egoic self, which identified as a writer, happy, but only what I spent my time doing. I reached the tipping point where I could no longer deny that I was not capable of continuing to pretend. Thank God, the foundation on my Portland house failed, forcing a life-size showdown; I chose to sell the house, and just in time I received my settlement check and was able to quit the job before I got fired. I promised myself I would never again use all the energy of my life to earn a living working for other people. I WAS SURPRISED TO DISCOVER,not working, that I still need a lot of down time, even with no time obligations I must meet. I try not to set too many appointments for myself, or I find I need to make up for the time spent, just from being out in the world. I spend the time I need to spend, resting, recovering from the overload of life in the 21st century, sometimes just from a single errand successfully performed—but the rest of the time I spend living and writing, not working at something that served others but not myself, that claimed the rest of my time as exhaustion. I was never ready, until forces convened, to devote myself to being myself, until the harmonic convergence when I was completely in tune with myself. Had the foundation of my house not failed, had I not been forced to consider divesting myself of this responsibility, had I maintained the illusion that I could sustain both a Portland house and a San Francisco flat (I was an office worker!) I would have collapsed on the job and been hospitalized. I HAD REACHED THE END OF MY ROPE,let go of it, and fallen into the crevasse. I should be able to do this, I would think, because I should be capable of this, because I set myself this task! I wanted to be able to say, I am sick of San Francisco, I am going back to my Portland house. The change did not occur until I was completely ready for it take place, and the universe gave me what I needed, a crisis of decision, to expand my consciousness and force me into acceptance of what was. I couldn’t do it. And it was a false option anyway. I don’t want to live in Portland. I left Portland for San Francisco. We are all the bringers of consciousness. My way is writing. If anyone relates to what I say, my purpose is served. I consider it part of my purpose to pass Tolle along to those who need to hear his message. The rest of you, perhaps it will come to you in time. If not, I hope you have a means of accepting the now as where you are, because, babe, there’s nowhere else to be. STOP…STOP…MY BRAIN IS PULSING!IT’S GOING TO EXPLOOOODE!a reader wrote, after “For Whom the Bell Tolles.” “You’ve already got the hang of it!,” I replied. “The less you think about it, the more sense it will make!:“I haven’t taken in enough to think less of it,” said he. “If I think any less about it, it’ll disappear!” I wonder, am I thinking too much or not enough? HOW DO I MAKE DECISIONS?Dreamed I impulse-bought a mid-size curly-haired dog, without even stopping to learn what breed, how old, care and feeding instructions, how it would disrupt my life, affect my cats, nothing. I know I am not suited to a dog, because I cannot be obligated to walk another creature when I myself sometimes can’t manage to leave the house. Is that how I choose men? Without a thought as to their effect on my life? Just, wow! I want to take this guy home! I bought the dog without considering how my cats would immediately hide under the bed, or later relate to him as nothing but “the interloper,” resenting any attention I gave him. I have two beloved cats I committed myself to caring for, Zazu and Zzyzzy, because it’s the least I can do, as I choose to be alone. “You are baby I never had,” I tell Zzyzzy, who is in his first incarnation of his nine lives, “except you’re covered with fur and have claws.”I have obligated myself to them. I owe them attention, care, love, food. They are the responsibility I brought upon myself. They are what warm my home, not the walls that surround us. PROPERTY OWNERSHIP IS A BITCHa friend commented the other day. Certainly my ownership of this flat is–what he said. The matriarch of my coffee hang tells me “You can’t let this flat go! This flat is you!” Wrong, mojambo. I refuse to identify myself as the owner of this flat. The flat is a place, it has nothing to do with who I am. I am not someone who needs to own a flat, who does own a flat. I am independent of the perception of “San Francisco homeowner.” It’s a matter of priority. My priority is that I never again expend my limited time and energy on this earth furthering someone else’s goal, or a distorted view of myself as “San Francisco homeowner.”This flat, getting rid of it, gives me the means to do that. The goal I seek to further is to increase my own consciousness and perhaps yours.Otherwise, what are we both doing here? TERRIBLE MOVIE.Wouldn’t advise you to see it. But the DVD of “Premonition,” starring Sandra Bullock, features a graphic representation of the calendar “grid” I described in Niente di rischiato, niente di guadagnato, a crosshatch grid embellished with graphic tree limbs that suggest barbed wire, or a feeling of being caught or trapped, suspended in a milky cloudy sky and marked with the days of the month hanging three-dimensionally from the grid into space. It’s an effective rendering of the arbitrary placement of our artificial system of timekeeping, and it makes it easy to visualize what I call “lifting the grid” to return to the amorphous amalgam of “natural” time and space that the grid fragments into hours and weeks and years. And that “free” space is what I call “the Zone,” the place where you can “use” as much time as you need for anything because there’s no end to it; you’re swimming in it. Time is not measured—Christ when will this be over?—but experienced. “Endless time,” as Tolle says, would be boring, and is not the same as “timelessness.” “TIME, SCHMIME,we’re all just moving through the ether, freely,” said Chris Parnell in the surprisingly amusing new sitcom “Miss Guided” (I like some ambient distraction when I write). Clock time is just one of the ways civilization segments our lives into pieces. It was standardized in America to ensure punctuality and coordination of the railroad system, and evolved into the 9-to-5 stranglehold whereby everyone has a certain “amount” of time to complete various tasks. Your boss wants the report by noon, no matter “how long” it would reasonably take to do it justice. I have twenty minutes to make the FedEx pickup! Perhaps people wouldn’t function very efficiently without deadlines, but they’d function more happily without pressure. But how many companies place happiness before, or alongside, efficiency? Our bottom line is fine, but our employees aren’t happy enough! Forget the efficiency expert, let’s call in a happiness coach! YET, HAPPINESS,that elusive quality, is best not held as a goal. Will Smith in “The Pursuit of Happyness,” remarks that Jefferson specified “the pursuit” of happiness as an inalienable right, because mostly we pursue it without actually living it. Of course you know the trick, though, right? To live in (not for) the moment, but in the moment, accepting it for what it is, to surrender to it, not resist it, because happiness comes in moments, and the moment is now, where you live. ENOUGH, ALREADYMy brain is about to retreat into that preverbal stillness that connects with all other living beings, maybe even dead ones. The stillness in which I occupy space and time as an energy force, not a body and a mind. ONE MORE THINGI just got an email from Courage Campaign.“It’s shocking and unbelievable.“California is in crisis, facing a $16 billion budget deficit. Social services are being slashed to the bone. Teachers and education professionals are being laid off by the thousands (up to 20,000, according to California Department of Education). Tuition and fees at state universities and colleges are being raised through the roof.” And California Republican Assembly members are unanimously supporting an appalling loophole in our state’s tax code that allows the super-rich to avoid paying sales taxes on…”Yachts.“Still blinking in disbelief? You read that right: Tax loopholes for yacht owners.” Lordy, Lord God, will it never end?
What an opportunity the Olympics present you, China! ------------------------------------------------------------ Green red yellow
WILL YOU STRAIGHTEN UP AND FLY RIGHT--FREE TIBET!! copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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