Biblioenophile

It’s time to go already.
They sit on the sand like soft-poached eggs.
She is molten on the inside,
and the thin white sweater holds her barely.
What is good and beautiful, he wonders.
Somewhere beyond him there are mysteries
as endless as time, made necessary
by the urge to be endless.
Sea-stars lay tangled and broken below,
and pretty, intricate shells
that reverberate with memory.

What we have in this life is pain.

Five years ago a friend called
about a girl I had loved dearly.
She only knew what she was told,
a truck, a cracking skull,
snow rendering everything
beautiful and surreal, as in a dream.

Sometimes dreams do come true.
Each day served to fill in details,
the single scream, the ambulance,
the months of struggle.

The traditional thinking is that
we should learn from our loss.
If we are I was never taught how.
Everyone, it seems, was busy
forgetting things of their own.

At some point new pain
becomes old pain
and at some point old pain
is like an ancient relative
you are ashamed to have around
but whom still, in some way,
you need to protect,
holding her hands in yours like
a precious stone.

Balsaminaceae. Jewelweed, spotted touch-me-not, impatiens. Soft herbs with leafy, pale, translucent watery stems. Pendant flowers, orange-gold, spurred with nectar-bearing sacs. Fruit in swollen capsules that explode when touched.

I remember jewelweed in Connecticut,
the way we went to it and through it
to second-growth woodland, a place
where honey-suckle, mounding up for years,
had made three tents tall enough to stand in,
both of you, still salt-damp from swimming
and sweating a little in the breezeless heat.
A place of tenderness and mischief and
brotherly fooling, for boys in lonesome families
ready almost to set out on their own,
ready almost for exile, and learning
thereby to love each other’s bodies.
                                                Learning touch,
the secret rites of touch, an how you both
could feel the blush of pleasure, both
feel thigh and belly muscles tightening,
long muscles under skin divided
tan and deathly white, feel long muscles
hard and smooth beneath the sea-damp
fragrant tensing skin against each other’s
both-still-salt-damp bodies, sweating a little,
smooth thigh and belly muscles taut and 
tightening tensing in the breezeless
heat against each other’s spray of
hot white dazzling
spray of
liquid jism hot against each other’s
dazed and emptied
                                    laughing bodies self-
conscious again but laughing, happy
at the way you both absurd released burst
free escaped laughing as you drew the
quick-cooled cum across each other’s salt-damp
tan-divided bodies smearing it
across the fragrant thigh and belly
muscles released relaxed now making it smear and
curlicue across the fragrant salt-damp naked bodies that you loved

(Source: washingtonart.com)

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerveracking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely, that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave. How to tell one from the other? “The craftsman himself”, says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the Modern West as the Ancient East, “the craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsman’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work”. It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in the multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philospher and economist J.C.Kumarappa sums up the matter as follows:

“If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his freewill along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality.”

from E.F. Schumacher, Buddhist Economics (1968), quoted in Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language (1977).

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