found objects

Posted on March 8, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #194: NEW DELHI: Even though everything we had in the old house was numbered, labelled and the whole thing carefully folded in on itself and squeezed into a removals truck with a set of instructions on how to reassemble, when we got to the new house it came out backwards, and the assembly instructions must have gotten lost as it was going in. Thus everything had to be emptied out on the floor in the search for the instructions, and that’s how it began to look like a vast three dimensional jigsaw of an instant house-kit, abstracted. So that when the assembly instructions were found, we weren’t interested in them anymore because we’d already found the proper screwdivers and L-shaped keys that fit into these holes in furniture assembly and started to put bits of it together by eye and what looked right. More things were discovered, ‘objets trouvés’, a collage, arising from found objects carrying that strange familiarity… traces of a former life.

And that was when I remembered something from long ago and far away; I used to be an easel painter, had exhibitions, sold paintings, thought about being a rising star in the World of Art. Then something happened – I don’t know what, an insight into how things arise and pass away. Everything just turned to dust, vapourized, reduced, distilled into the elements, thoughts created by Mind and the words required to describe it started to run out. Anything still standing after the event was taken to pieces, carefully numbered, labelled and the whole thing folded in on itself, then squeezed into a large box that I’ve carried around with me ever since and never opened… until now.

I cut through the old nylon ropes and slit around the edges of the box, sealed with parcel tape and old labels saying FRAGILE and sticky stuff from years of airline stickers for check-in luggage. The lid opens with a creak and a great volume of pandora’s creative playfulness is released in a soundless explosion. Well, that’s done it… no going back now. Brushes, pallete knives, tubes of acrylic paint, acrylic medium, glue gone hard, unusable adhesive tape, bits of measuring devices. and pieces of artwork. Boxes of charcoal, ink and yellowed pencil drawings for a painting I remember I never started – wouldn’t it be fun to go back, after all these years, and pick up where I left off?

I don’t know how many years have gone by, lost in the dream. Woke up one day, look in the mirror, hair gone white; the Rip Van Winkle effect – all of the elders are dead now and I’m grateful for everything I have that belonged to them (strangely addressed in the past tense). I’ve forgotten the ‘me’ that used to hold these brushes, squeezing these tubes of vermillion, cadmium yellow, it’s been such a long time, so many journeys extended out over thousands of air-miles, hours and days maybe weeks of looking out the windows of an airplane somewhere in the clouds and the world coming in through these eyes but seeing it like it’s not ‘me’ personally that it’s happening to, more like it’s an extension of what’s out there.

A sense of the air and spaces inside things I never even thought of until now. It’s possible that this is the right time to return to it. Less words more imagery, it’ll change the direction of the blog. Let’s see, I’m going to take a look into that pandora’s box, maybe find out what it was that caused things to shift as they did and what can be retrieved from the wreckage… got to go now. Sayonara bloggers, more later….

UPDATE: CHECK OUT THE NEW PAGE OF MY ARTWORKS, GO TO HOME AND LOOK FOR THE PAGE TITLED ‘ART’ UNDER THE HEADER IMAGE

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springtime, new delhi

Posted on March 4, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #193: NEW DELHI: Watering the plants upstairs on the roof terrace and there’s this small one looking so simple and symmetrical, extraordinary. I take a photo of it and zoom into the wonderful experience of a life form in a different kind of temporality. It’s springtime here and the analogy of everything waking up applies, except that there’s no snow in winter, really no winter, and there never was any time before this, or anywhere in the future when things were or will be asleep. Everything is awake, the sense of an eye like a camera aperture so wide open the edges of it creak with the strain of it trying to open wider. It’s an endless cycle of birth/rebirth, the seed contained in the fruit that falls from the tree and from there another tree grows which creates another seed. No beginning/no end, all forms intertwined with each other to the extent that they are inseparable, bound together in time. The inclination is to think what was it like before this, when things were separate and the mind tries to pull it all apart. What was it like before all this, before the Big Bang?

Another kind of reality. What happened before we came here? We were in another house in New Delhi. It had a roof terrace and seeds were planted in flowerpots there, we carried the pots and everything from there to here and these seeds are now sprouting on this roof terrace. It makes no difference to the plants if they’re moved, so long as they have the same conditions, the cycle continues; seed/ plant/ flower spinning in their own arising and falling away, an enfolding and unfolding sequence of patterns in movement, and I come along, view it from this entry-point in time, called ‘here’.

There’s the urge to create an object that could fill this perceived space, this seemingly incomplete world: the sense of a vacant place we need to fill with something held in high esteem, and that will make it whole… what is it? Christians call it God, Hindus call it Brahman and Buddhists have no name for it, because everything is integrated, nothing exists outside of this – really nothing, not even the word ‘nothing’. Subject/object together in a oneness of contemplation, in conscious experience and the path taken leads us into a realm so fragile and subtle you can never be absolutely sure you’re not just seeing it the way you want it to be, and not really how it actually is. Better not to call it anything, acknowledge its presence, awareness is all-inclusive, mindfulness, take care, and see how that goes.

The sensitivity of the mind, not held by the limitations of the body, always looking for more than what there is, searching beyond the present instance; using one thing as a springboard to get to the next, everything is driven on and on, and present time is not here at all. There’s the sense of a game, an energy, a curiosity – a desire to get involved with ‘it’. The object is the desired state. It belongs to ‘me,’ the act of possessing it requires that there has to be an ‘I’ to whom it belongs. Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even my enemy is mine. Thus indirectly creating an identity that is always somehow incomplete unfulfilled, searching for the truth in this and unable to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost. It’s the seeking that causes it to be formed, reformed and transformed: the world is seen, sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done, but there is no do-er.

“Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still – for if we listen they are saying, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever” – imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent, listening to the very voice of him who made them and not to that of his creation; so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men, nor the voice of angels, nor the clouds’ thunder, nor any symbol, but the very Self which in these things we love, and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things: And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy; so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination which leaves us breathless: Would this not be what is bidden in the scripture, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” [Saint Augustine]

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whispering winds

Posted on March 1, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #192: VASANT VIHAR, NEW DELHI: An extraordinary battle with uncompromising traffic to get here on time for Head-ache’s appointment with the doctor at 5pm. Shrill penetrating, sharp horns blast, push, persist, insist on the direction we take, and suddenly we slice through the evening rush-hour, arriving at the place too early by half an hour. It’s like that sometimes; tumble into a parking slot by the park, uneven ground and the car tilts over and slightly back. Open all the doors to allow the fresh air and warm wind to blow through.

Things are suddenly rustled in the quietness here in the tilted back seat and I get loose papers weighted down or they will fly out the doors. It’s like we’ve always been here and any memory of the journey to get to this place has been somehow displaced by the wind passing through the interior of the car; a quick investigation here-and-there, then out among the trees, rustling the leaves in a great sigh of high frequency leaf-whisper sounds, masses of individual notes played in cluster upon cluster, swishing and swooshing foliage branches – a sound that seems to crash like waves on the shores of a sandy beach.

The first wind of its kind for many months comes at the end of the cold season. Its warmth enters everywhere, into every thing; blows out gusts, sucks in voids and spins everything around. Swooping down, so inquisitive, and filling up all the places and spaces, then out and up in the sky where only birds engage with it. A wind that’s present everywhere at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind? How can that be possible, isn’t it formlessness? We know it’s here only by the sound of it, in the leaves and seeing the swaying of branches in a succession of movements, an expression of the air displacement itself; a manifestation of the wind – I can become the wind, the space where it goes.

Now this – now that, long tree branches drifting and swaying patterns of light and shade over my clothing, look up at the sun and get pleasantly blinded by it in a twinkle. This wind blows through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises; I become more alert when it’s very loud, feel at ease when it’s still and quiet. It becomes the thought flow, gently restless in the swooping shadows plunging deep into foliage pattern. The oneness of it all includes everything seen and unseen. Better not be late for our doctor’s-appointment, we spill out of the car, hair-whiplash on forehead, gather myself up with my companion Head-ache and together we stumble across the road to see the neurologist witch-doctor, amazed by this persistent wind. Sunlight and shadow-shapes of foliage sweeping over the roadway and path, all around…

But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
[Dogen]
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tanhã, craving

Posted on February 28, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Craving perpetuates the fever of unsatisfied longing, this is the state of tanhã. The opposite of a sense of well-being, tanhã is not a happy bunny. It constantly feeds the hunger of desire but the action of feeding it only sharpens the edge of appetite. Too much is never enough. It explains very well the reason why some people are committed to ‘wrong view’ with an intensity that takes your breath away. Tanhã is this deep craving for the ‘self’ we construct in fear of ‘no self’, a result of tanhã. I am ‘me’, in this world, due to tanhã, the reason for rebirth.

In the story of King Assaka and Queen Upari, Queen Upari died and became a cow dung beetle in the next life. But she felt quite at home in her lowly existence as a cow dung beetle, because of tanhã which is delighting in whatever sense object presents itself and wherever it finds rebirth. Reborn as a dog, it takes delight in a dog’s existence; reborn as a pig, as a chicken, there is always delight in each existence. [‘Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective’ by Mark Epstein].

In the causality sequence that forms the 12 step cycle of the wheel of existence (paticcasamuppada), tanhã is step 8. The way to stop tanhã arising, is to cut off the conditions that lead to its beginning; interrupt the sequence before tanhã happens, and bring the whole thing to an end. The entry point in the cycle is just before tanhã: step 7 feeling (vedana). At the vedana stage, there are three possibilities: pleasure, pain or neutral feelings. If feelings of pleasure or pain arise, then craving or aversion will take place and tanha will be the result. If, by an act of will, only the neutral feeling is allowed to arise, the 7th link will be neutralized, de-activated. That being so, tanhã cannot arise, and the next link (upadana) will fail to arise and so on. [See “Fundamentals of Mainstream Buddhism”, p214-215, Eric Cheetham]

For me, the discovery that interrupting the sequence at vedana changed the momentum of everything was awesome, to say the least. This is how I quit the tobacco habit and my whole attitude changed. By allowing the neutral response at vedana to be present for a moment, I noticed an easing in the craving, a cessation, just enough to trigger my curiosity. The cessation took place when I noticed it was the way out of the cycle of repetition, and I understood then how to be free of it. The neutral feeling didn’t register as anything, just the awareness that there’s a space, a gap that wasn’t there before; a vantage point where I could see how to change the cycle of events. It’s in the nature of tanhã (as with everything else) to be transient like this, it’s something that comes and goes. Knowing it leads to Suffering, we can stay distant from tanhã for a moment, and allow it to start the process of cessation by itself. Trying to confront or defeat tanhã will not work because willed action only causes it to arise again.

Situations that used to completely overwhelm and demolish me disappeared; other habitual behaviour began to fall away. I began to notice the wonderful emptiness, the wholeness, a peace of mind that comes about when you understand there is a way out of Suffering; everything that arises, ceases.

…there is a noble truth about the cessation of suffering. It is the complete fading away and cessation of this craving [tanha]; its abandonment and relinquishment; getting free from and being independent of it. [Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta]

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Source for header image
this is a summarized form of an earlier post titled, ‘too much is never enough‘

‘server not found’

Posted on February 22, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Here in our new place in South Delhi the internet speed is really low at the moment so I called the technician and he said it would be okay tomorrow for sure, but right now they were working on the line near to where I am. Okay, thanks, bye-bye and hang-up phone – that’s it… the devastation of no internet. How can I just say to myself, well you can read a book or something? We are internet-dependent beings, without internet we become kinda unstable… and I remember writing about this feeling before. So I spend some time looking for it in my drafts folder. There was a storm at the time too and I find it in the Search box, using ‘storm’ as a title, et: voilà! It felt like all the unearthed electricity in the air, had given my internet server a boost just at the crucial moment and ‘server not found’ was actually found:

Switzerland: Just before the storm started I was having this internet upload speed problem; trying to get a post into Publish but not enough oomph for it to go. I try again; waiting for it to slowly come up with the WordPress site to click on the upload button, but stuck again. I start to take it personally, caught in thinking this is ‘bad.’ And, pretty soon, it gets blown out of proportion, turns into a small crisis, like a fire burning down the house. The intensity of feeling is incredible. This is what a very low internet speed can do. Am I in withdrawal? Focus for a moment, just there at the desk, feet flat on floor, watch the breath, stop the mind, and suddenly I’m in an empty space, surprised to discover it was that quick! And without the wandering thoughts, there is just silence! Just the physical awareness of the body, comfortably seated with this inactive thought process like its engine has given up and it’s immobile. I could hear the storm really loud around this time; lightning and thunderous bangs and crashes across the sky – a perception of vast distance.

It’s like someone in the floor above has gone berserk, pushing over huge pressed steel cabinets and metal desks, metal oil drums, BOOOOM, BADAAANG, and a small silence in between, then the echo of it returning from a long way away in the immense space of night sky. Still sitting at the desk in the violence of the heavens and the room is brightly illuminated by a flash of lightning very close, followed immediately by another overwhelming CRASH. The lights go out, and for a moment I’m thinking the sound is the bricks and masonry of the building tumbling down.

I fall to the floor in a crouched position to protect the head and then up from there quickly out to the front room, and exit by jumping over the balcony from our place on the seventh floor? No, can’t do that, look around, no damage I can see. The flap of wings as birds roosting on the balcony rail are stirring a bit, but they’re not really getting in a tizzy about this. If the buildings were to fall to the ground, no problem, they’ve got wings and can just fly away.

Back into the room, waken up the computer and I get a connection right away, loading completed immediately. And that’s the story of how I got this post written in a room full of flashing lights like a Press event taking place and uploaded no problem – harvesting ambient electricity? The sounds of war and bombing raids; the noise of it was colossal, somebody said later it’s because of the Jura mountains reflecting the sound and the lake resonating like a huge sheet of metal; an area of about 500 square kilometers.

‘The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore; we don’t even have to call it discomfort. It’s simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothness of water, the gentleness of the breezes, and the goodness, solidness, and dependability of the earth. Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.’ [Pema Chodron]

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velocity

Posted on February 19, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #191: DELHI: Photo shows the hoarding (with part of the word ‘caution’ in Hindi) behind which, work on the Delhi Metro underground is taking place. The construction zone encroaches on to an already crowded roadway as three lanes of slo-mo traffic are bottle-necked into two, then one – all that earth has got to be shifted out of the hole I suppose… traffic congestion so bad, road rage is a palpable thing… static electricity flashing and sparking in the spaces between metals very close but don’t actually touch; a kind of unseen neon percussion hi-frequency zizzle in the surround-sound of car horns in a musical composition on alto sax, trumpet, trombone and all the various combinations of horns in the brass section of the orchestra. Yes it is quite bad. Ok for me, I’m not the one driving, just sitting in the car interior here, trying to not be upset by it and get a headache coping with the traffic jam in my mind, What’s needed here is breathing; a long deep in breath, and slow outbreath….

Thoughts without substance arise and fall away. The good feeling is nice when it’s here, the bad feeling is nice when it’s not here – and the often overlooked position of neutrality situated between the two extremes; the Buddha’s Middle Way. It was a turning point in my life when I first saw that if I could remain in neutrality as the feeling comes on and be aware, observe how it’s possible to sidestep the clinging thing, the Velcro of self that’s always inclined to attach itself to the same old thing: this-is-mine-so-it-belongs-to-me, then the chain of events is interrupted and everything that happened moves on, ungrasped-at… as simple as that.

The sense of being in a state of no-self is one of astonishment and the relief that the whatever-it-was THING did not take place… wow! how good is that! This feeling moves it all forward in such a sensible and wholesome direction. These small successes are necessary in a world that doesn’t educate children about this basic truth and the moments of conscious experience are instead allowed to form events that occupy our thoughts. No teaching on how to liberate oneself from unrest and the state of always having to make something out of it; the present moment cloaked by Mind pondering over either some past memory or preoccupied with something in future time that hasn’t happened yet. Never really at ease, never able to witness this peace… the inherited karma of generations.

Forever unable to see that thought processes lead nowhere in the end, maintain themselves hesitantly, and are forgotten in the on-going awareness of what’s happening now. I’m part of it, but I’m not ‘in’ it. The present moment is not the near future, it’s happening now – so fast, you could say, look, there it goes, into the past. Yep, history taking place before our very eyes…

We learn from the principle of dependent origination that things and events do not come into being without causes. Suffering and unsatisfactory conditions are caused by our own delusions and the contaminated actions induced by them. [Dalai Lama]

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neutrality

Posted on February 12, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #189: DELHI Hospital OPD: First time here, looking for room number twenty-four in a sea of people. There it is – and a seat near the door is vacating itself as I approach, a hair’s breadth thing, musical chairs. Reverse into place; beeb-beeb-beeb, lower body in sitting posture: ‘This seat has been taken folks, thank you’. Possession, identity, this is ‘me’, head upright, but easy behaviour, no fast moves, no eyes looking out… an averted watching through peripheral vision. I’ll not interrupt your eye-beams folks, go right ahead… and I’m looked at with a few fast head-to-toe glances, visual-sweeps I can feel coming from different parts of the room. The only white guy here, probably the whole building; pale, bleached-out, transparent, old, colourless. White hair, white beard, white shirt; a totality of whiteness, OMG! how white can you get?

Yep, it hurts the eyes, sorry about that but you’ll not notice me after a while, merge with background patterns, disappear before your very eyes; it’ll seem like I’ve always been here, neutrality, nothing remarkable, neither too much, nor too little. Trying to blend chamelion-like with skin tones of chestnut brown, volcanic ochre, oatmeal-compexioned, golden people. Gold-bangled, gold-ear-ringed, nose-ringed women – toe-ringed too, open sandals swish-swoosh footwear, soft-shoe shuffle: swish swoosh through the standing crowds, magical beings in vivid costumes of all kinds.

I can close my eyes now and drop back into the inner world, a kind of circus-clown backwards tumble into the darkness of that inner space. Neutrality; I can find it straight away sometimes, just the action of letting the mind go; a sense of opening in receptivity to nothing in particular – the space between things. The neutral feeling that’s neither one thing nor the other, not really noticeable – of course, you could be looking straight at neutrality and not see it. It’s that space, the gap that comes before any action takes place. Finding my centre in that space.

There’s a childhood memory of a face looking down at me, mouth articulating words I can understand but somehow said too slowly and I’m already wondering if I missed something: “Now, are you listenin to me? Just think about what you’re doing before you do it okay?” and for an instant I’d get stuck with that… maybe I could see what was needed to make it work – I think. Or maybe it’s taken me all this time, right up to the present moment, writing this post; it’s taken me decades to understand that it’s neither this nor that, neither coming or going. Touch base with neutrality.

Somebody calls my name; it’s my turn I’m led into a small room and a small doctor aged 60 maybe with tightly groomed bristly grey beard that grows all round his mouth right up to the edge of a dark purple lip line, original front teeth one larger than the other. Other than that, hardly any eyes, no ears seen, baldness with a few brave hairs blowing in the breeze from the ceiling fan. So his central feature is this island of mouth in a field of grey beard, but a nice man, kind, smiles a lot. I tell him about these headaches all the time, show him the diagnoses by other docs: PHN and a really yuk photo in my phone-camera of the Herpes Zoster in full bloom. He spins around the cranium (a mouth in a head) something insectoid? Says, as he is writing, Tegrital 200mg, Tryptomer 25mg, (Carbamazepine), and it’s scribbled in unreadable writing, same as all doctors do, gives it to me and I’m gone.

So that’s it, back into neutrality, wondering if these new meds are going to end up in another crash course in how to avoid dependency… or not.

“There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support. This, just this, is the end of stress.” [Udana, third book of the Khuddaka Nikaya 8.1]

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Header photo source

all that remains

Posted on February 9, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #188: DELHI: Early morning in an airport coffee shop space while Jiab is checking-in for her flight to Mumbai. Looking around and up above at this steel glass and tiled environment. Sometimes all I can do is find a quiet place and just sit. Look inwards… it’s an unreal world. There’s this pain in my head, but I have a magic medicine pill that sends the pain away. It’s gone… and a part of my mental functioning gone with it. Where’d it go? I think it went into another room in my head where there’s a party going on all the time day and night. I can hear the music beat throbbing constantly, but can’t recognize the music being played, no worries, the main thing is I can’t feel the pain; besides, it’s more like stress than pain. Sometimes I have no stress at all; sitting alert and mindful like the Buddha. Other times I feel the energy of that stress so strongly it brings attention to the thin membrane separating me from the pain – it could rupture any moment now. Wait and see if it’ll be this time?

Allow all things to pass, continue to sit like the Buddha upright in a chair, quiet and alert to everything that’s going on. A few tables down from me in the coffee shop there’s a teen-aged girl with head and body hunched over her iPhone device all I see is the reflected color glow from the screen on her face. The colour of her eyes sparkle with light that’s continually changing; flashes of blue, pink, and everything goes orange. She is speaking with her friend, loudspeaker on, so she has her hands free to work on the keyboard and smoke her cigarette secretly, and here’s the thing, she’s writing messages on her phone and speaking with her friend and smoking a cigarette, all at the same time. Multi-tasking on social networking FB, twitter, SMS, very noisy texting noise: poo, paw, poo, paw, pee, pay, pay, poo ; digital tones I feel are as sharp as auditory stabs on this frequency that all digital sounds, phone-ring-tones and alerts seem to inhabit.

The voice of her friend at the other end is really LOUD. Must be she’s calling from another party environment similar to the one going on in my head, all kinds of party noises – in fact I can’t tell the difference… what’s happening to me? Is she calling from inside my head? Disregard that thought. She has to shout to be heard: Yeh, I know her, ahna got natheen to say to her, that back-stabbin sawn offa beech. The girl here says something really loud in agreement and they seem to acknowledge this observation as being cool. Maybe I can seek what peace there is in the space surrounding this noise, up to the ceiling structure, the bigger picture, the larger space within which all this is contained, and already the sound of the girl’s phone feels like a tiny diamond or sparkling jewel.

The intrusive lunge of the girlfriend’s voice into my space again brings me back to the way things are; it’s a razor sharp Samurai sword. Language syllables shrill and piercing sound waves suddenly slice my head and upper body into pieces scattered around. The sense of bien-être quivers and gasps in a kind of death. These are the battles fought in the mind.

Jiab comes with her cabin luggage on wheels behind; small oriental, everything compact and a unit of information, we say goodbye at the security line and I make my way back. Out through the crowds and into the car, squeezing through traffic against the flow and wondering why then realizing we are making a sudden U- turn.

The whole landscape is just gone, pieces and parts of objects recognizable from faraway events in history when huge towers tumbled to the ground in seconds, as if all the concrete and steel had turned to dust instantly. The population just can’t figure it out, the psychological effect… it’s too huge. Time to move on from here. Only clouds of dust now, the effect it has on everyone is the same as the metaphor; devastation is all that remains.

If one is a true learner of the Way, one does not search for the faults of the world, but rather speedily applies oneself to attain genuine insight. If one only can see with perfect clarity, then all is completed. [Rinzai]

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Photo (source) showing one of a number of Buddha ‘laps’ at the Ayuttaya site Thailand. Many thanks also to WordPress blogger: ‘of rhyme and reason‘ for the photo
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

cruel pillows [part two]

Posted on February 6, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Delhi: You may know already about my permanent headache caused by PHN on right side of the head and I’m a Buddhist so I can’t appear to be too grouchy about it. I can walk around gently balacing this headache, do my shopping and as long as things are simple and easy, I’m okay. I’ve been researching the kinds of pillows available in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It’s an on-going search because of my disturbed sleep at night. And it’s not easy in Chiang Mai a country town, where the staff are trained to smile, look nice and be elegant, but they don’t actually know anything about the product: I want to buy the softest pillow you have please?.

The sales girl shows me a pillow and poses beside it as I give it a little squeeze with my hand and she smiles. It’s not soft enough, try the next one, squeeze it, and sales girl, elegant, posing gives me a little smile again and I’m beginning to feel, get me out of here, there’s a headache coming on. I try every pillow they have in the shop and the sales girl is tiring of the instant smile when I squeeze; but I buy one because she was so good at posing beside the product. Get back and crash out with a bad headache. My side of the bed is full of pillows tried, discarded, there’s no space for any more.

Eventually I find one in Delhi and this pillow is so good! I take it with me everywhere; a totally soft pillow placed in my suitcase on top of everything. It’s also a good way of holding a whole lot of loose items tight in an oversized bag because the pillow expands into all the corners when you squeeze it in and zip up the bag tight. So, fling in loose items like pens, cables, adaptor plugs, knowing that the expanded pillow will hold everything in place and get to the other end, take out the pillow and everything’s like a screen-shot of how it was when you were packing at the last minute.

So I took it with me to Switzerland then all around the UK and back to Bangkok. One morning, early, Jiab puts the pillow into the washing machine. I see my pillow pegged out there on the washing line and I’m in a state of shock! Yes, she says, pillows can be put in the washing machine and I have to go out to look at it a few times hanging there in the hot sun, but it it wouldn’t dry out enough so I had to improvise something else that night and was tossing and turning for hours… cruel pillows. It was dry by the end of the next day but when I tried it that night, it was lumpy.

So I found another one in India, a crafty- artisan place, wild cotton filled fragrant pillow, I was assured. I tried it one night and it was great, so good to rest the head and feel normal. Then a couple of days later, I went for an afternoon nap – the headache is always better when it gets laid down. And, lying on my side with ear planted deep into the soft cotton, I was just drifting off into sleep when I hear something moving inside the pillow! An insect? A tiny lizard? Something struggling to get out from the weight of my head for some reason. The thing is you get insects and ‘things’ in the strangest places here, and not impossible that, when the pillow was being filled maybe some cotton-habitat creature ended up in there. So I opened it up, scissors at the stitching at one end. Spread everything out on the floor. No insect, no small creature… maybe it scuttled away unnoticed, aha! freedom, didn’t see it, but I did find some leaves and a bit of a small branch. Well, getting that all cleaned out and stuffed back in again was not easy and there was quite a bit left over. Never mind, stitched it up again with needle and thread, Then the final fluffs of cotton removed and got it back into its pillow case, slightly slimmer and looser, slowly lowered my head on it and it was wonderful, even better than before. So good!

I’ve suggested to Jiab we open up all the hard pillows in my collection and take out some of stuffing but so-far she’s unconvinced…

cruel pillows [part one]

Posted on February 4, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: I just remembered this expression: “a bull with a headache.” It comes from Scotland, where large Men drink whisky all night, then one staggers through to the breakfast room in the morning and is demonstrably angry with everything, then one goes off to work in the wild, wet, wooly Northern landscapes of my distant memory.

Now I live in Asia which is really nice, gentle and warm and I’m a Buddhist and all is well in my world, except I’ve got a headache – all the time. A Buddhist with a headache? What to do, I have wondered many times. For me it’s an opportunity to be conscious and aware of what I’m doing all the time, because the headache is likely to get bad at any time. And I’ve thought too about what we’re doing here in the blogging world… our consciousness/awareness of our ‘world’, in a sense, is what we’re writing about, really, one way or another. Even if a lot of space may be taken up with trying to express how we get to that point. Even so, it’s an all-inclusive thing, isn’t it? And sometimes what we write is not as important as the spaces left where there’s nothing written. No point in asking why the ‘world’ should be (or shouldn’t be) like this. Or even try to identify it and analyze it – as you’ll see if you keep reading this – I’m just trying to make friends with my headache, in a round-about way, not too direct… see how that goes. I’m not expecting it ‘to be’ anything, at times I try to anticipate what it’s likely to do next, wondering how it’s getting on.

The headache arrived last September as a result of shingles on the right side of the head, here’s the link: PHN, but it might give you a headache reading about that, so why don’t I just introduce you to the headache itself? Think of a motorbike helmet that holds your head tightly, a snug fit … that’s it. Now there’s this cloud of intense feeling that, as yet, doesn’t have a name, it’s just energy. As long as it remains anonymous, things are okay – reasonably okay, the only thing is that what you have is this hair-trigger-sawn-off-shotgun-crash-helmet of a headache, minding its own business and nobody’d even know it was there.

So, the lesson is, be careful about what you think! Now, in some foolish un-mindful moment, I might say to myself: Do I have a headache? I can’t feel it now… and BOOM it demolishes my head. So naturally I get to know not to do that, not to ‘name’ it, identify it, or try to make it into something. And, important, I have to learn about this mechanism that can be held in the default STOP position. It’s the: please-don’t-go-there thought; that split-second, small, even tiny, space before the thinking process is engaged and what was really, absolutely, going to happen, by some miracle, doesn’t.

It cannot be stopped sometimes, of course, and you find that the forewarned intuitive snap feeling it’s about to happen means it just happens anyway and there’s devastation all around as you reach for the meds that are opiates anyway so you’re kinda hovering on the edge of a Edgar Allan Poe nightmare most of the time when you overdose on them.

This is how it is, predictably unpredictable so you have to be ready for it to happen any time. If it takes place at night, probably the best way of explaining the feeling of it, when dosed up to the eyeballs with sleeping pills, but still the headache remains and you’re awake for hours, it’s this: pillows appear cruel – have you ever thought of pillows being cruel? Probably not, well I know everything there is to know about pillows, in my research since this headache came to stay with me last September. Really, what I don’t know about pillows is just not worth knowing.

But that’s a whole different story…. [See: part two]

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About this picture: This is the missing head, a screenshot taken from a YouTube video, which shows the head briefly at the end of the clip: https://youtu.be/MjRf-b8Ezis

The whole story is, it’s an ancient Buddhist sculpture, which at the time of the top photo, was at the Beijing World Art Museum and being made ready to be sent to Kaohsiung in Taiwan where it will be reunited with its head.

Its head was stolen in 1996 from the Youju Temple in Hebei Province. The sculpture, made of white marble, is around 1,400 years old. The body is 1.59 meters tall. The head was obtained and offered by a private collector in 2014. Repairs will be made before it is put on public display in 2016. Twenty years after it was removed. The museum has selected another 77 relics for the exhibition in Taiwan.

The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council approved the body be sent to Kaohsiung for a three-month Buddhist Cultural Relic Exhibition jointly held by the administration and the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Memorial Hall, before the complete statue is sent back to Hebei. It symbolizes the possible reunification of Taiwan with China.
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