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136. Lost words

25 September 2013 by Ben Howard

Seamus Heaney, 1984 Alfred, New York

Seamus Heaney, 1984
Alfred, New York

As the world knows, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney died last month at the age of seventy-four. On the day of his funeral, former Irish Senator Maurice Hayes, father of the actress Margaret (“Maggie”) Hayes, recalled that Heaney brought a handwritten poem to Margaret’s christening. “I must put that away,” Hayes said to himself, “because by the time she is getting married he will have the Nobel prize.” Regettably, the manuscript eventually went missing, Hayes’s best efforts notwithstanding. “I put it away so carefully,” he ruefully reflected, “that I couldn’t find it.”*

Something similar happened here in the village of Alfred, New York, though the circumstances were rather different. Seamus Heaney visited Alfred University in January, 1984 to give a reading. He stayed in the home of Carol (“CB”) Burdick, an adjunct professor of English who frequently hosted visiting writers. At the time, Seamus was suffering from a toothache, and for most of his reading he kept his palm pressed to his cheek. Early the next morning, he assuaged his pain by writing a piece of light verse, a self-ironic poem modeled after William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers” (1508). As he was leaving, Seamus thanked CB for her hospitality and presented her with the handwritten manuscript. Continue Reading »

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135. Clear seeing

11 September 2013 by Ben Howard

Bexley,_pond_at_Danson_Park_-_geograph_org_uk_-_972263Here in the village of Alfred, New York, many of us subscribe to our community newspaper, the Alfred Sun. And some us have discovered that the Alfred Sun, accompanied by a few well-placed squirts of Windex, can make short work of washing windows. The Sun is compact, maneuverable, and eco-friendly. Two full pages will suffice to wash a standard casement window. You can wash as many as three with a single issue.

A few weeks ago, I was engaged in that very task, but the work was not going well. Although I’d liberally applied the Windex and energetically rubbed it off, thick streaks remained. Repeated efforts produced the same result. Newsprint is effective for cleaning glass, I recalled, because the oil in printer’s ink repels the dirty water. Could someone have quietly switched inks? Should I try the Times Literary Supplement instead? Continue Reading »

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134. The weirs of age

28 August 2013 by Ben Howard

The weir on the river Chew in Pensford

The weir on the river Chew in Pensford

It has often been observed that time seems to go faster as we grow older. Our birthdays arrive with increasing rapidity. Shortly after my fortieth birthday, I began to feel as if I were taking the garbage cans out to the curb every other morning. And with each ensuing decade this subjective sense of accelerating time, which a number of my older friends have also noted, has grown ever more prominent. It is as if we were afloat on a swiftly moving river, and each of those “important” birthdays, the ones that mark the decades of our lives, were another waterfall, whose drop and velocity have yet to be experienced.

Yet, from the vantage point of Zen teachings, neither birthdays nor waterfalls are quite what they appear to be. They are at once real and illusory. In his book Living by Vow the Soto Zen priest Shohaku Okumura has this to say about waterfalls:

A river flows past a place where there is a change of height, and a waterfall is formed. Yet there is no such thing as a waterfall, only a continuous flow of water. A waterfall is not a thing but rather a name for a process of happening. . . . We cannot distinguish where the waterfall starts and ends because it is a continuous process.*

Continue Reading »

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133. Open and shut

14 August 2013 by Ben Howard

Shuts and passages ShrewsburyThere is nothing new under the sun, a revered text tells us. And while the latest inventions from Silicon Valley may seem to refute that proposition, it may well be true of rhetorical devices, those verbal and mental forms with which we construct our arguments and formulate our opinions. First identified by the ancient Greeks and Romans, those devices are still in use today, both in the public arena and in our private, everyday lives. And they can have a profound effect on the ways we experience the world, whether we realize it or not. Continue Reading »

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132. This precious human birth

26 June 2013 by Ben Howard

Allegra Rose Howard, three days oldOn Friday, June 14, my granddaughter, Allegra Rose Howard, arrived in the world, weighing eight pounds and twelve ounces. As I reflect on that glad event, I am reminded of a phrase from Tibetan Buddhist teachings.

The phrase is this precious human birth. Its source is the Chiggala Sutra, where the Buddha speaks of the chances of being born a human being. Those chances, he observes, are infinitesimally small. They are analogous to those of a blind tortoise swimming in an ocean as large as the planet, where an ox’s yoke is afloat on the waves. Every one hundred years, the tortoise surfaces. The chances of being born human are no better than those of the tortoise surfacing with his head in the yoke. Human birth is extremely rare and therefore most precious.

In the lojong system of mind training practiced by Tibetan Buddhists, phrases such as this precious human birth are known as “slogans.” Contemplated and absorbed during sitting meditation, they are subsequently applied to everyday life. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer explains, the best way to work with a lojong slogan is to develop it “as an almost physical object, a feeling in your belly or heart.” Once the slogan has embedded itself, you can work with it throughout the day, until it becomes “part of your mind—your own thought, a theme for daily living.”* Continue Reading »

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131. True realism

12 June 2013 by Ben Howard

In a recent column Paul Krugman spoke of “fantasy posing as hardheaded realism.”* As might be expected, Krugman’s subject was economic, his theme political. But his well-wrought phrase has resonance beyond the spheres of politics and economics.

To begin with, it evokes the stereotype of the hardheaded realist—the seasoned, no-nonsense person who lives in the real world. At the same time, it suggests that realism may be little more than a pose. If, as Krugman implies, realism can be false, the opposite must also be the case. What is true realism, we might inquire, and what are its salient traits? Is it by nature hardheaded—and hardhearted as well? Continue Reading »

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130. Awful but cheerful

29 May 2013 by Ben Howard

Purple Finch

Purple Finch

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but one morning not long ago I called my wife to offer that very thing. I could pick her up at her office at noon, I proposed, and we could go to the Jet for a bite to eat. After checking her schedule, Robin readily agreed.

As it happened, however, Robin was called out of her office at 11:45. Not wanting to leave her husband in limbo, she asked Kevin, her work-study student, to inform me that she would be back shortly.

“What does he look like?” Kevin asked.

“He’s gray and slightly built.”

An hour later, over my egg-salad sandwich, I noted that there were other adjectives Robin might have chosen. “In aspect marvelous, in form divine” came to mind, but it lacked specificity. Perhaps “lean of limb and stern in mien”? Or, in the interests of concision, “compact and professorial”?

“But you are gray and slightly built,” Robin insisted.  At which point I rested my case. Continue Reading »

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129. Wild surmise

15 May 2013 by Ben Howard

800px-No_Known_Restrictions_Horse_Racing,_Currier_&_Ives_Lithograph,_1890_(LOC)_(489398731)For better or worse, the word surmise seems to be growing rare. I can’t recall when I last saw it in print, much less heard it in conversation. Like the landline phone and the handwritten letter, this old-fashioned word may soon be leaving our daily lives.

Far less endangered is the mental activity surmise describes. In ordinary human affairs, the act of surmising is not only habitual but also necessary for survival. Precisely defined, surmise means “to infer or conclude from inconclusive or uncertain evidence.” And if you have been up for several hours, it’s likely that you’ve already surmised a hundred times or more. Continue Reading »

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128. The straightforward mind

1 May 2013 by Ben Howard

 

Manjusri

Manjusri

One afternoon many years ago, when my son and I were playing chess at our dining-room table, our conversation turned to a woman I’d recently met.

“She seems honest,” I cautiously observed.

“I would have said ‘straightforward,’ Dad,” Alexander replied, taking my rook with his knight. Although he was only thirteen at the time, he was even then a stickler for definitions.

As it happened, however, father and son were both close to the mark. The word straightforward is a relative newcomer to the English language. The first usage cited by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1806. Originally, the meaning of straightforward was primarily descriptive. The word meant “directly in front of or onwards; in direct order.” But by the end of the nineteenth century, straightforward had acquired a moral aura, as in the Rev. Griffith John’s characterization of one Mr. Wei as a “plain, honest, straightforward-looking man” (1875). If not quite synonyms, honest and straightforward had come to occupy the same moral universe. Continue Reading »

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127. No coming, no going

17 April 2013 by Ben Howard

Thich Nhat Hanh

Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh

If there is one indisputable fact of ordinary experience, it is that all things come and go. The bus arrives, picks up its passengers, and departs. Children grow up and leave home. Friends die. Yet throughout the literature of Zen we find the resonant phrase, “no coming, no going.” And over the centuries Zen teachers have often intoned that phrase, as if its meaning were self-evident.

For most people, I suspect, it is not, but it can sometimes be intuited through direct experience. With that aim in mind, I would like to offer a simple, twenty-minute exercise, drawn from the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

This exercise consists of four gathas, or meditative verses. If you wish to explore the exercise, I would recommend that you record the gathas, leaving silent, four-minute intervals between them. Or, if possible, sit with a group, and appoint one member to recite the gathas. If you have a small bell to ring before each of the gathas, so much the better. Continue Reading »

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