Andre Agassi and the Search for Truth

"The search for truth is not the search for desire."  Albert Camus

"It might not be the perception people want of me and it's not be the perception I want of myself but it is my true self and that's what we're left with. If my story can help one person, let alone millions, who wake up in a life they didn't chose, wake up in a marriage they didn't want, if it can help a teenager about to step into the pitfalls I stepped into – it's an easy price to pay if the price is some judgements, or some loss of reputation or some false image." Andre Agassi in an interview with Michael Donaldson of the Sunday Star Times of New Zealand

"Peace of heart is something you have to fight for every day and it has very little to do with your circumstance." Andre Agassi, ibid

Andre Agassi is a story in two parts. It is a story that Dickens or Dostoevski could have told. The first part is about the boy from childhood up to the realization of what it is to be an adult; the second part is what that man does with that realization. It is a story about character and the building of character, of depths of hell and of redemption. It may seem a bit much to put on a sports figure but it does fit.  His story is that amazing.

When Andre first appeared on the tennis scene I did not like him.  I didn't like the flash, the dazzle or the whole "image is everything" attitude. I didn't like his hair, his clothes nor his game. I felt his game lacked what he lacked - substance. When he disappeared and dropped to 140 in the world I thought it was a kind of justice for the lack of any integrity in his game and I thought he would disappear like so many other flash-in-the-pans that have littered tennis with their less than substantial brilliance.

When he returned - head shaved, clothing almost monk-like in austerity, attitude so calm, so reserved - I tried at first to ignore it. I wanted to hold on to my prejudice I had for the teenaged boy he was.  People rarely change, after all, and when they do isn't it always suspect? Yet, I found myself drawn to this different person.  First of all, the boy was gone. Maturity seemed to have settled comfortably within. His game reflected this aspect. He was calmer in matches, determined, resilient - all the things I have admired in other players, were there. I found myself drawn in to this new character and thinking that the shaved head was emblematic of his change - a reverse Samson. Shorn of his locks Agassi was more real - a stronger person.

It is interesting to me that Andre seems to have felt the same way about himself. I watched  60 Minutes last Sunday because I had heard about the startling revelations in Andre's autobiography Open.  Crystal-Meth use, drinking, tanking games, hating tennis, a hairpiece, a first marriage he didn't really want - I can't recall a sports figure or celebrity of his stature revealing so many damning and embarrassing things at one time. Andre talks about how much he hated tennis, how his father, abusive and over-bearing, forced his boy to play - even to the point of deliberately missing school. School was a waste of time according to his father.  That first Agassi, the image king, hated himself. No wonder he drank, no wonder he treated tennis with such contempt, no wonder he eventually found himself ingesting drugs. "I couldn't feel any worse about myself" he says. Anyone who has ever hit such a low point in their lives knows exactly how this feels.

What is so great about this story is the way in which Andre turned it around. He says in the interview how, when he had reached rock bottom, had been bounced out of the French Open in the first round, his coach gave him an ultimatum - quit or start over - that he reassessed what he wanted. Now a choice was before him, a choice that was his own to make - not his father's, not anyone elses. He chose to embrace his choice and make the most of this choice and to respect and appreciate what this would bring to him everyday.  He carved for himself a redemption of his former life.

There has been a lot of condemnation of Andre's revelations.  Other players have responded with comments of pity, some of outright anger and disdain (the worst being Navratilova). In the 60 minutes interview Andre answers them in such a beautiful way saying that he would hope for a little more compassion for the person he was at that time, a little more understanding, than anything else. Compassion for this boy who didn't know who he was, who was told what and who he would be by his abusive father, who never had the chance to make the normal kind of choices for his life until he was well into his twenties, who truly had wanted to disappear from life and almost succeeded in doing so. Compassion. What a beautiful thing to ask for.

We often forget that many of these players come to us as teenagers.  Their lives are put under such scrutiny and the expectations are that they will be perfect. They have to be because they see daily what happens to those whose lives do not measure up. To make a wrong step is to be on the front page of the papers or the lead story on the evening news. It is an unforgiving world we live in. Andre's actions as a boy, as a young man still discovering who he was and what he wanted, were no different than so many students I deal with everyday. They lie to everyone around them and to themselves, they fear discovery, they want to disappear. They often do not know how to seek help.  Andre found a way out of that hole. He clawed his way out and made the choice to use the very thing that put him in that hole to make his life a redemption of that existence.

Andre has handled so much of the response to his revelations with grace and dignity and, yes, compassion. I can't recall the last time I have been so moved by the story of a life. In the Sunday Star Times interview quoted above he goes into greater detail than he did even on 60 minutes. What comes across is a man of great self-reflection and humility who possesses a well-earned wisdom and sense of gratitude. I have even more admiration for him now than I did before the revelations of Open.  He is still, very much, a champion.

For me here is the most amazing aspect of this story: now Andre runs the Andre Agassi Foundation For Education.  He hasn't devoted his life to tennis - the sport his father pushed on him - but to education, the very thing his father considered worthless. This year was the first graduating class of his academy in Las Vegas - an academy for the poorest kids in Las Vegas. Every student is going on to college. If that is not redemption and justice than neither exists.  Andre deserves not only compassion but respect.

A Beggar Rails

"Well, whiles I'm a beggar, I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue than shall be,
To say there is no vice but beggary."
                                        Shakespeare, King John, II, i, The Bastard's speech

It is time to rail. I open the paper every day (perhaps a mistake) and see comments about how we are becoming socialist thanks to this or that government plan, Obama, the Democrats, etc. Usually these comments are made by people who will only give up their own social security or medicare when you pry their governement provided plans from their cold dead fingers. The illogic of so many doesn't make sense. Our country has been a socialist country for a long time now. The recipients of our socialism are the richest among us. Every time a bailout occurs Goldman Sachs gets richer. The tax cuts of the last 30 years have favored the rich.  Tea bag protests coming from people who own million dollar beach houses and people who can't even afford to stay one week in that beach house join in the protest worried about a chunk of the pie they will never see. Now that is logic that defies description.

There was a time when people didn't forget where they came from. You hear stories about the old movie stars who were so afraid of ending up being poor again that they would clutch every dollar as if it were their last. Now people spend every dollar as if there is an endless supply coming from some magical well in their back yard. Or the nearest ATM. Pretentions are killing us. We need to get back to the idea that most of us are not and never will be among the elite in terms of wealth and power. Why then should we continue to support taxes and programs that favor that elite? Talk about being bamboozled.

Remember that show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?  They should bring it back again and call it Lifestyles of What You Will Never Be. That would be a closer reflection to the truth. When you hear about executives in the insurance industry having homes twenty times the size necessary for a family's needs, of having personal zoos, of personal planes and yachts and... Oh hell, you know. You Know! I cannot fathom not only the lack of outrage but the abbetting of manipulation that continues. Barnum said a sucker was born every minute but, as a friend once said to me, at least a sucker is born every minute. We are that nation.

We believe the self-promoting myths of charlatans such as Donald Trump and believe that one day we will be that man (God knows why). We believe that we must protect not our current interests but interests that, more than likely, we will never possess (but just happen to be the interests of 1% of our nation). It's why strikes are not anywhere near as effective as they were a half century ago - the general public has been convinced that the strikers are being selfish. Instead of identifying with the working stiff the public identifies with the corporate execuctive. The Reagan revolution. Guess who wins? We truly do get the country we deserve.

I know, I know, not everyone believes this. There are plenty out there trying to open the eyes of walking dead. Maybe I am being pessimistic. It comes from watching my local newspaper, The Washington Post, once known for bringing down a president, engage in the worst form of ethical behavior in their advocacy of educational reform. It comes from watching how the right continually plays the rest of our country for fools by making the moves of Bush seem as if they have come from Obama and then cry "Socialism!".  It comes from watching people who cannot tell that their pockets have just been picked, reaching into their savings and handing more of their money over to the pickpockets.

Yes, I am a beggar railing today. There should be so many more.

A Butterfly Gone

"Ma. Ma! Mother! Hullo.  How are you, old woman? What’s that? You don’t recognize me? Well, well, well.  Take a guess (Shakes his head.) No. (Shakes his head.) No. Try again (Shakes his head.) What’s the matter with you, Ma? Don’t you recognize your own son? (Shakes his head violently.) No, no! Not him! It’s me, Zach! (Sweeps off the hat to show his face.) Ja. Zach! Didn’t think I could do it, did you? Well, to tell you the truth, the whole truth so help me God, I got sick of myself and made a change.  Him? At home, Ma. Ja. A lonely boy, as you say.  A sad story, as I will tell you.  He went on the road, Ma, but strange to say, he came back quite white.  No tan at all. I don’t recognize him no more. (He sits.)  I’ll ask you again, how are you, old woman? I see some signs of wear and tear.  (Nodding his head.)  That’s true . . . such sorrow . . . tomorrow . . . . Ja . . . it’s cruel . . . it’s callous . . . and your feet as well? Still a bad fit in the shoe? Ai ai ai!  Me? (Pause. He struggles.)  There’s something I need to know, Ma.  You see, we been talking, me and him . . . ja,  I talk to him, he says it helps . . . and now we got to know.  Whose mother were you really? At the bottom of your heart, where your blood is red with pain, tell me, whom did you really love?  No evil feelings, Ma, but, I mean, a man’s got to know.  You see, he’s been such a burden as a brother.  (Agitation.) Don’t be dumb! Don’t cry! It was just a question! Look! I brought  you a present, old soul.  (Holds out a hand with the fingers lightly closed.) It’s a butterfly.  A real beauty butterfly.  We were traveling fast, Ma. We hit them at ninety . . . a whole flock.  But one was still alive, and made me think of  . . . Mother . . . . So I caught it, myself, for you, remembering what I caught from you.  This, old Ma of mine, is gratitude for you, and it proves it, doesn’t it? Some things are only skin-deep, because I got it, here in my hand, I got beauty . . . too . . . haven’t I?"      from The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

Zakes Mokae is gone. I saw him perform in 1985 in Philadelphia. He was playing Zachary in Athol Fugard's Bloodknot. Fugard was playing the pass-as-white brother of Zach, Morrie.  I went to the performance on a Sunday night and was mesmerized from beginning to end by the two actors on stage. Two actors who were so completely in synch with each other that they were truly brothers. I came out of that show in a trance, went home and the next day bought tickets for two more perofrmances that week. Each performance, Fugard and Mokae were as great as they were in the first performance. No let up. Extraordinary. Each performance was one of those magical moments in theater when you feel you are watching a high-wire performance. You are taken in by the danger and the grace of the performers in the face of that danger; you are entranced. The spine tingles, the hairs stand on end. You almost hold your breath in anticipation and excitement. In such moments you realize why theater is what it is, not film or tv but of the ethereal world. God, I would give anything to go back in time to that point and relive that performance again!

There are examples of his work on tv and film. He appeared on Monk and West Wing. There are the films, Cry Freedom, A Dry White Season, and there is the filmed stage version of Master Harold and the Boys. The last comes closest to capturing what Zakes Mokae was like as an actor. No film that I can think of came close to doing that. But for me, in my heart, close to the tears, is that performance 14 years ago in Philadelphia. Mokae holding the stage, the audience so quiet you almost didn't know they were there as Zach held his imaginary conversation with his mother, talking about butterflies.
                                                                                             

The Idle Educator in a Place of No Greed

"If you live with the commandment on no greed and face colors, all the blue, yellow, red, and white are sufficient to nourish your eyes; all the pine winds and water purling, like string and pipe music, are sufficient to please your ears."  Jiun Sonja (1718-1804), a monk of the Shingon (True Word) school of Buddhism

 On the beach reading the poetry of Miyazawa Kenji.  The quote above is a note within his own poem, Commandment on No Greed.  Kenji mentions the educated idler. I play on that as I am an idle educator waiting for the resuming bustle and noise of a new school year.  For now, though, I practice solitude and contemplation. I am an idle educator. The waves are small today. Not big and crashing but small and steady. I enjoy every moment. The sun on my skin, the sand on my feet, on my legs, everywhere.  The sounds. The voices, the waves, the birds. I close my eyes lying on the towel and simply listen to all the sounds that lull, lull, lull, like the waves, slowly coming in. "The world is the shadow of a transient, blue dream." From Kenji's unamed poem from 1927. The sky is this poem made manifest. Kenji in my head, in my heart. The words of his time and world a part of this time and world. The small, articulate, concise sense of universal, a recognizable truth.

Kenji is awareness.  His writing reflects an attention to the small things that we sometimes do not notice, but should. The feel of the wind. The recollection of the turpentine smell of fresh pine needles in a poem he writes to his dying sister, Pine Needles. The touch of rain on the skin, the touch of nature, everywhere he gives the sense of the leaves quivering in the wind, of the sounds of rain and sunlight, of stars. Raindrops hitting the face. The quiet whispering of moments in a field. Reading him on the beach, feeling him in everything around me, I go for a walk along the shore.

 

I see the world through the lines of his poems. Or I am simply made more aware of the simple things around me.  The pattern the water drying on the sand makes.  The bird flying off to my left. This small, deserted area of beach, only a few people here or there. I am open to every sensation and relish each as a sign of living. I enjoy the moment. I watch the small plovers and a few gulls. I feel the sand, sometimes dry and hot, sometimes wet and cool, and enjoy both feelings. I have no complaints. I take each moment with a definite gratitude. I am in a place of no greed. In Spring & Asura Kenji says:

As I breathe the sky anew

lungs contract faintly white

(body, scatter in the dust of the sky)

The top of a ginkgo tree glitters again

the Zypressen darker

sparks of the clouds pour down.

Was it because of experiencing his sisters death so acutely or because his own health was so fragile (dying at 37) that he "sees" the world with such grace and harmony? The sense of what matters most. A sense of the impermanence of everything, of the reciprocal nature of all things, the touch of the sea to the sand to the rock to the grass. The grace of all things around us.

I come across an injured plover. It's left foot drags, bent at an unnatural angle. The bird continues to peck at the sand and run from the waves. It continues impervious to it's irregularly bent claw. It sometimes hops on one leg, sometimes gently leans on the bent angle, and still moves with agility and, oddly enough, grace. This is Kenji walking in the woods of his native Iwate dying of pleurisy, taking in everything and turning it back out with such intense focus. Iwate becomes Ihatov in his writing. He relates to Chekhov, another dying writer. A doctor among people. A doctor who is a writer. William Carlos Williams. Chekhov. The teacher of agriculture, Kenji.

 

I continue my walk moving towards and along the dunes. Illegal footsteps run into the dunes ignoring the posted signs. Clouds speckle the sky like small brushstrokes of white paint. Clouds figure in so many of Kenji's poems. Entire poems dedicated to clouds. The Prefectural Engineer's Satement Regarding Clouds. You cannot but help when reading Kenji to turn around the very things you have read and feel them in everything you encounter. I look up at the clouds, at the blue sky, at the crowds of people far away gathered in one area of the beach, of the sand, of the birds both on the shore and in the sky, of the sea grass moving in the wind, the kites flying above, and I feel every word he writes as if he is the painter of this world. Or, as Kenji himself wrote:

At the very end of the blue sky,

above the atmospheric strata where even hydrogen is too thin,

there lives a group of eternal, transparent living things

who'd find it too cloying

to think even such thoughts as:

"I am the entirety of this world.

The world is the shadow of a transient, blue dream."

(All quotations from Poets for the Millenium: Miayazawa Kenji Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato, University of California Press, Berkley, 2007)

A Clean and Well Named Place

  In a small beach town named Hualien, on the central eastern coast of Taiwan, there is a bookshop called Time.  It is a place that fulfills that Hemingway requirement of being a clean and well-lighted place.  It is a quiet place with tables to sit by a window and read a book, a small counter where tea and other drinks are served, a back reading room for the more serious worker, an upstairs room for book groups and readings, and books. There is a zen-like quiet to the place, a serenity that almost compels you to sit down with a cup of tea and a book and read or write until the place closes. If you click on the sign up left you can go to the owner's blog.

The building itself is one of those old, Japanese colonial houses you find scattered around Taiwan. These are wonderful and beautiful old buildings and the sin is that there are not more buildings with this esthetic in Hualien. Once they were everywhere but now you have to find them scattered throughout the city (although there is one cluster near the temple on the hill called the Japanese Generals' houses which are all together and gives you an idea of what this city must have once looked) often punctuated between a couple of ugly modern structures.

Time sits on a sort of corner and almost seems by itself which enhances its quality.  The first time I saw it, as my friend brought me around the corner with a smile on her lips (because she pretty much knew what my reaction would be), I could not help but feel a sense of awe. I prayed that inside it was as perfect as it was outside.  It was. When I speak of bookstores being temples Time is the perfect example of that ideal. It didn't matter to me that 99% of the books were in Chinese. I browsed anyway, an illiterate looking at pictures, and enjoyed the ambient feeling of peace.  I could sit there for hours and do nothing but read with a cup of tea by one elbow and my notebook and pen by the other. I will do this the next time I am in Hualien.

Time is the perfect name for such a place, for all you want to do there is spend time.

The Burn: Vassily Aksyonov 1932-2009

"All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based."  Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Vassily Pavolovich Aksyonov, one of Russian literature's great explorers of the "enigma of the self" is dead.  He died on Monday after a year-long illness. His death hid quietly in the shadows created by the overwhelming light of the Michael Jackson death saga.  In Russia many mourned the passing of one of their great writers. In the U.S., where Aksyonov lived in exile for almost 20 years, it was noted in the New York Times and The Washington Post but if you stopped someone on the street and asked them about Aksyonov's death they would not know who you were talking about or why he was important.  He did not create any great dance moves or fashionable music. He merely wrote books and taught literature and lived. Lived a life much like the title of his most famous work - he burned with life.

The first book I read by Aksyonov was The Burn.  It was 1986 and I remember, quite vividly, reading this on the NYC subway and people near me staring at the cover (the half-naked woman probably drawing their eye). Normally I was quite self-conscious about things that drew attention to me but I was too engrossed in the novel for that to matter to me.  The Burn is the novel that caused the Soviet authorities to revoke Aksyonov's citizenship. It is a hyper-realistic, fantastic rendering of life in modern Moscow (late 1970s) following 5 characters - a jazz musician, a writer, a scientist, a doctor, and a sculptor - each of whom share the same middle patrionymic, Apollinarievich, and also the same childhood memory of life in Siberia as the son of parents who have been labeled enemies of the state.  Applying Kundera's definition of the novel to The Burn is an interesting experiment. After all, here you have five versions of one person, 5 distinct but essentially linked personalities - it is like following, in one novel, the five possibilites a single live can take under given circumstances. If that is not an examination of self I don't know what is.

I always thought the title, The Burn, was perfect as it describes the level of searing intensity that you feel from this novel, it does not let up on the reader. You wonder through the maze of Moscow with each of these characters who are fueled by alcohol and lust and their tortured memories of childhood. Many of the cultural references I did not get at the time, being unfamiliar with aspects of modern Russian culture, but that didn't matter to me so exhilerating was the reading.

Years later in DC I read Generations of Winter. This novel has a monumental feel to it and has often been described, quite favorably, as a modern War and Peace. It tells the story of one family's fate during the Stalin era and follows them from Stalins rise to power in 1925 (roughly) until his death in 1953 (the first book, Generations of Winter ends in 1945 during the war, the second book, Winter's Hero, continues to 1953 - Winter's Hero is hard to find in the U.S. due to poor sales and publisher apathy).  This novel gives a history of Russia for the first half of the 20th century and quite beautifully, and at times magically, conveys the struggles that a normal family had in the complexeties of life under Stalin.

I was given a copy of Metropol by a friend, something I treasure to this day. Metropol was a collection of Russian writing put together by 23 Soviet writers. Among them, Andre Bitov, Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Popov, Vladimir Vysotksy and Aksyonov.  This collection was refused publication in the Soviet Union but circulated clandestinely, like much good writing at that time. Eventually it was picked up in the West. Several of the contributors and editors resigned or were expelled from the Writer's Union and Aksyonov found his citizenship revoked (due also to the publication of The Burn in the West). Many of the writers are still not so easy to find in English, like Vysotksy and Popov, so it is a treasure to have this book in my library.

Around this time I decided to re-read The Burn. This time I knew many of the references Aksyonov made, not to mention I had been to many of the places described in the novel, had walked the same streets. One of the things I learned in the second reading was how close The Burn was to Aksyonov's life.  Aksyonov's parents were high ranking Soviet officials who were arrested in one of the early purges and sent to different cities in Siberia. Each thought the other had died. Aksyonov's mother was Evgenia Ginsburg. Her memoir of the time in Siberia, Journey Into the Whirlwind, is one of the finest works about the Gulag.  Aksyonov's portrayal of his childhood through the character of Tolya von Steinbock is the most moving and tender part of this remarkable novel. It has the raw, vivid feel of painful truth - the hard memories of a boy who is now a writer. 

The second aspect of the novel I understood better was Aksyonov's use of his friend, Vladimir Vysotsky. Vysotsky was an actor, poet, and singer.  His performances were legendary. His Hamlet was still spoken of with amazing regard a good 20 years after his death. His music was banned during his lifetime, only available through homemade cassettes. Now he is available on cd and heard on the radio. He sang and played the guitar; the singing sounded as if it were ripped from his soul and he strummed the guitar in such a way that you wondered whether there would be anything left of the instrument when he was finished. Vysotksy was married to the Godard actress Marina Vlady and lived, amazing for his time, an almost jet-set life, flying between Paris and Moscow. This, also, is reflected in the book. When I first saw Vysotsky I was entranced. When I re-read The Burn and saw that he was a character, I was delighted.

Recently I began reading The Island of Crimea.  This was Aksyonov's fanciful imagining of what would have happened had Crimea been an island instead of a peninsula. Could the White Guard, in their retreat from the Reds during the 1920 Civil War, have made a last stand and held out on this imaginary island much the way Chiang Kai-shek held out on Taiwan? I must quote the whole of his preface here because it gives you an idea of both the beauty of his writing but also the wonderful sense of humor that invested everything Aksyonov wrote.

"Every peninsula fancies itself an island. Conversely, there is no island that does not envy a peninsula.  Every Russian schoolboy knows that Crimea is connected to mainland Russia by an isthmus, but not even every adult knows how flimsy an isthmus it is.  When a Russian rides along it for the first time and sees it for its narrow, swampy self, he can't quite suppress a seditious "what if."
  What if Crimea really were an island? What if, as a result, the White Army had been able to defend Crimea from the Reds in 1920? What if Crimea had developed as a Russian, yet Western, democracy alongside the totalitarian mainland?
  The southern coast of Crimea is a subtropic zone protected from the firece Russian winter by a range of mountains. During that winter the mountains are covered with black clouds seemingly fixed in time, while down below the sun is shining. If those isolating, doomful black clouds remind the Westerner of Stanley Kramer's film of On the Beach, the Russian can't help thinking that selfsame seditious "what if."
  A month after I completed The Island of Crimea, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. I must admit the invasion was not the only factor that made me wary of submitting the novel to a Soviet publisher.  The Soviet authorities maintain a firm and realistic view of geography.  They know that the world rests on three whales and two elephants."

I was fortunate to meet Aksyonov once.  I told him about reading The Burn for the second time and how delighted I was to not only know who Vysotsky was but to have been able to watch a couple of his movies and see his tv performance when I was in Moscow. Aksyonov immediately started talking about how incredible Vysotsky was as a performer. He mentioned how one of his own students, a young man from Jamaica, had become obssessed with Vysotsky, collecting every recording he could find and learning the songs by heart. He said how incredible the effect that Vysotksy had on people that he could reach across such a different culture and race and still connect. He also talked about their friendship and how much they used to talk with each other whenever they were together. "I still miss him," he said, "even after all these years. I still miss him." The look on Aksyonov's face was wistfull with meloncholy. You could see that the pain of his friend's death was still with him.  The same should be said of Aksyonov. We should all miss him.

Solitude

When I was younger I used to have fantasies about disappearing.  Not magically but realistically, disappearing like Richard Kimble, the character in the old tv series (and film) The Fugitive. I used to think it was a great thing he had going. He would just up and leave everything behind - no real possessions to speak of - and take off for the next town, the next promise of a new start. There was something about that idea, something so strong that I used to think I would do the same thing. After all, when you do so you leave behind all the accumulated worries that your life has become.  The other choice, and one that has similar appeal to me, is shutting myself away, like a hermit. But then, for all intents and purposes, I have done this. I live by myself in this place, a small apartment nestled in the back of a building, cuddled next to a green area and a wall, almost like a cave. If I don't use the phone no one knows I am here. No one calls unexpectedly - those days are long gone. You don't come here by accident or in passing. I like the idea. It is like being a monk and yet, anytime I wish, I can always step out among the living.

I can sit here and listen to the sounds of my city. Not too far away a group of people are sitting together on their porch, drinking and talking. I hear them every so often. The women are particularly loud, their voices emphatic in what is otherwise the silent evening. If not for them all I would hear would be the chirping or singing of birds, the whirring of insects, the occasional passing of cars. Their voices are loud, though, and sometimes strident. They cry out "Oh God!" or "Yeah, yeah, like that!!" with the rising inflections of schoolgirls and not women. I want to scream back at them, respond to their voices and embarrass them into silence. But I don't. I ignore them and soon the insignificance of what they are saying is matched by my attitude towards them.  I am, despite this enjoying my solitude.

I recently watched the film The Station Agent (2003). This film was more like something you would see from Europe or Asia, a simple film about people living their lives. That the main character is a dwarf is really incidental. It is really about a person who wishes to be left alone but life keeps intruding. Life keeps getting in his way.  This is what happens with solitude, quite often.  Solitude demands that we spend time to ourselves, isolated, able to think without interruption. But life intrudes, demands attention and forces us, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes needfully, out of the cave we place ourselves in.  It is not always such a bad thing, this intrusion, anymore than shutting oneself up is necessarily good. Balance is the key, I would guess.

There is a wonderful book of conversations between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan called The Raft Is Not The Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness. The book is an incredible collection of conversations between the Buddhist monk and the Jesuit priest held in 1975, just after the Vietnam War had ended and Berrigan had been released from prison (for his involvement in burning draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland).  The conversations are stimulating, to say the least, and push one to think deeply about so many questions involving religion and spirituality, faith and commitment.

One of the comments I took away from this book is one made by Nhat Hanh. He says "In order to save the world, each of us has to build a pagoda." He goes on to explain more deeply what he meant.

"There were people who thought that I was urging them to build more pagodas so Buddhism would become a national religion. But this pagoda cannot be built by stones and sticks and things like that, because this pagoda is a sanctuary where you have a chance to be alone and to face yourself, the reality of yourself. If you don't have a pagoda like that to go into each day, several times each day, then you cannot protect the Eucharist, you cannot protect yourself, and you cannot protect the world from destruction." (The Raft Is Not The Shore, Orbis Books, 1975,1982)

  I think this idea, of having a sanctuary within oneself in order to contemplate who you are, is a powerful idea. In many respects we do need both the physical as well as the spiritual sanctuary. Sometimes we need that place that helps us to achieve that degree of self-reflection in which we can be honest about ourselves. And yet, at the same time, we need to be able to do this regardless of what location we are in. After all, life does not always afford us such places whenever we need or want them. Better to be able to use any place and delve within for discovery.  Much as Finbar McBride in The Station Agent finds his search for solitude constantly interrupted by the people of Newfoundland, New Jersey and yet he finds for himself a richer, more rewarding life and seems to find through these connections the very best kind of solitude, so, too, do we need to carry within us our own pagoda.

I accept this contradiction. This desire and enjoyment of the solitude of my cave and yet the understanding and need for contact with others. I am enriched by both. I hope it makes me a better person. I will hear the voices outside my window not as petty annoyances but as songs being sung. The song of humanity alive and buzzing.