The most rigidly perverse (perversely intransigeant) of my self-containments in Bill Weaver's company and tutelage, however, was my more-or-less polite but absolute disdain of the (popular, non-classical) music that he, his family, and all our friends doted on, and which was always playing in the background. So resolutely did I ignore it that I seldom noticed it, unless it were too loud to talk over, or else offended or irritated me in some other way. Roy Orbison, for example, usually provoked my gag-reflex, with his whining, his abject heterosexuality, his calling women who were not his mother "mama." Likewise, The Supremes, with their indecent, unwashed-sounding wailing, appalled and sickened me. I tried for the most part to keep my distaste to myself, not to talk when the company was obviously enthralled by the awful stuff, to leave the room if it got to be too much for me. When then, after a decade and a half of inner growth and isolation , I wrote my five-part setting of "Phyllis plus avare que tendre," and showed a copy of it to Bill (saying, as I handed it to Sue, his wife--who, to hear Bill tell it, was, when in a state of Tantric extasy, a fount of supernal Wisdom--to hand to him, "You asked me once what I had ever done. This is what I have done.") he was dumbfounded: "Those are parts," he said several times over. "I can't imagine thinking of music in that way." I felt (almost!) vindicated. And yet, and yet...Sue was less than impressed; in fact she said something like, "What am I supposed to do with this?" and sneered as she handed the manuscript over to Bill. The sneer (expressing ignorance, inability to read music, and utter contempt for the notion of music as something that is read) remained on her face and in her attitude for the rest of the interview-- during which she kept silent--which Bill cut short, I think, because of her hostile impatience. So, upon reflection, I suppose she did understand something....

A couple of decades later, Bill having been dead for a dozen years, our differences on the subject of music emerged again, as irreconcilable as ever, when I was invited to a family party at a restaurant/nightclub given by Bob B. the husband of the younger Weaver sister, where it was understood that there would be "music" played by Bob and his professional rock 'n roll band. It pained me to have to decline the invitation, and to have to tell the older sister (to whom I have never lied, and from whom I have never concealed anything) why: I could not have borne having to sit still and listen to (what is to me) such trash, and then to have had to smile and say how much I'd liked it. It'd've killed me.

There, I said it. I am happy with my captious formulation--as Confucius said, "Show one corner, know four corner[s]. With him [who does] not know four corner[s], [there is] nothing to be done." I suppose--and there is perhaps a touch of malicious glee in my supposition--that those whom my little one-cornered thesis will leave wildly wondering will be those with whom I didn't want to do anything anyway.

Mais revenons a nos moutons. I have not, actually, seen much straight pornography (in the sense of images of women which sexually titillated me). And, for sure, I haven't looked at any since once, when I was seven years old. But I have heard straight pornography in adjacent video booths at the porno shops. One cannot escape it: The female participants in it are ever so much louder than anything heard in any but the most effeminate gay pornography. Their shrill cries of extasy are piercing; horrifying even, when it dawns on you how closely their extasy seems to resemble anguish. Sometimes gay male Brazilians, notably, get raucous in their sexual exertions, and sometimes they are very much in earnest--but they are always good-humored, and never display the least hint of the awful (patently phony) seriousness of female/effeminate sexuality. Venus ridens is apparently a polite fiction of Latin poets, as Ogresses are of French fabulists.

On the other hand, great heat of passion between masculine men--not always, but often-- is conveyed with a conspiratorial smile, or grin (not a chuckle, for that would be disruptive) of amusement/appreciation/congratulation--exactly like the indulgent grin with which men approve the lawless exuberance of little boys. And, remarkably enough, it is exactly like the slight, wide-eyed smile with which women approve the tears and bad temper of little girls.

When once you have acquired a Zen master, you've got one for all eternity--or at least for the rest of your life. And so, the teachings, the direct transmission of the Dharma, the arguments and disagreements that I have had from and with Bill Weaver (died 1987), beginning in December of 1964 when I was barely twenty-two years old, have virtually directed my life, and absorbed my interests and attention ever since. Bill was of the Heroic Generation. He smoked too much, drank too much, and lived life down to the nub. During World War II he was a reconnaissance scout, spending the war behind enemy lines in Germany, blowing up bridges and sabotaging railroads. At the end of the war he was among the first to arrive at Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz, sniping out the SS Guards before the Red Cross got there: "Never believe," he said when I asked him to summarize the reality of the concentration camps, "that those stories about the hot lead enemas are not true." He also once said that the thing he found hardest to fathom about Nazis ("a space I cannot make") was how they could pick an infant up by the heels and dash its brains out against a wall. But that was history that I only found about later. What mattered to me, first of all, was his profound knowledge of the Sutras, the Vedas and the Tantras, and his ability to quote them extensively from memory and to compare and elucidate them. Second of all, his philosophy of wisdom-through-drugs and generally getting high was exactly mine and that of my little sangha of friends. And thirdly but not lastly, his total understanding and appreciation of me made him my dearest friend. He was straight, married, with daughters who are still my most esteemed friends; but, though I think he didn't quite see how I got there, he was perfectly accepting of my gay sexual orientation. Only, when I insisted that it was natural to me and far more of a turn-on for me than anything I had ever experienced with girls, he said, as much wonderingly as disagreeing with me (He and all his womenfolk were never tired of telling me, admiringly, that I was a male-male, without an effeminate bone in my body), "But still, you must admit that the greater the polarity, the greater the intensity." At which I loudly hooted, emphatically asserting that the last thing I wanted from another stud like me (my frankly narcissistic preference) was any kind of dumb-ass, dip-shit polarized difference. "What I want to have sex with," I said, and, in those days, meant, "is an identical twin." Uproarious laughter. Those were good days.

One might, of course, say that Chuang-tzu and Wu Chengen are scarcely without charm or wit--but--compared to Rabelais, Voltaire, Anatole France, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde? What is there in all (at least any that I know of) of Oriental literature equivalent to that single sentence of the clown in The Tempest--speaking of the loss of a bottle of wine--"There is not only dishonour in that, Monster, there is infinite loss"?

But to speak further of the normal masculine man's exclusive attachment/aversions, I, for one wonder, how exclusively heterosexual men can tolerate the sight of men in their pornography--and I note that some in fact cannot, preferring to watch "Lesbian" pornography, in which, apparently, they can imagine themselves as the only male participant. And certainly, male homosexual pornography is commonly devoid of any suggestion of females, or even of effeminate males.

But having flung, as it were, a Buddhist spanner into the unreflecting doctrinaire mechanism of Western Psychology, I'd like to do something similar to the reflexive smugness of the Middle Way, by suggesting that wit (being charming and funny and witty) counts for too little among the Three True Religions (one of which is not Confucianism), and by saying that among those things, other than logic and reason, by which we ought to be persuaded, wit counts as great as any.

A joyous can of worms this fruitful topic. Note that I cannot, and frankly don't wish to, speak to the psychic realities of women or of effeminate or bi-sexual men. Of these I happily confess that I am ignorant--as ignorant as these commonly are of masculine men, both homosexual and heterosexual. Colette, I think, was the only woman who ever described (in la Chatte), without unconscious, willful distortion, what the affections of men are like--and, with all her sympathetic objectivity, even she has to say that, from the point of view of a woman, there's something monstrous about them. This (view of men, by women, as an alien or at least inhuman species) is corroborated clearly by infinitely lesser lights than Colette, such as any authoress of 'Romance' fiction that you can name, and by Deborah Tannen, Phd., in all her one-note books about the difference between men and women; notably in You Just Don't Understand: Wherein she notices: that little boys, when asked to sit quietly and talk seriously together, refuse mockingly to do either; and that she can't help finding such little-boyish behaviour unsettling and irritating (especially in contrast to the behaviour of little girls who obligingly do as they're asked); and that men invariably find the raucous insubordination of little boys cute (while finding the corresponding docile obedience of little girls contemptible). Dr. Tannen admits to being mystified by this glimpse into the world of boys and men--and she knows that it means something; but she's not sure, and really doesn't care, what it is.

So, my font for this post is trebuchet, whose relation to medieval catapults seems a far stretch, but it is pretty and clear. Stopping in yesterday morning with Dr. C., basically to say good-bye, I found to my mingled gratification, embarrassment and dismay, that she'd been reading this silly thing--and could quote it to me. I'd almost forgot that I'd given her the URL. Well, anyway, it proved to both of us that this blog, for what it's worth, is my unvarnished, real, unposed, truthful self. And that, as the heir and emulator of Michel de Montaigne, I take to be a considerable achievment. Anyway, I continue reading Buddhist texts, marvelling at the subtlety and acuity of Mahayana psychology. Nobody else has ever so lucidly analyzed the question of What is Mind? and What is Thought? And in describing Desire and Attachment the Buddhist co-valence of Aversion is light-years ahead of crude Occidental systems of "conflicting" attractions. Let me just try, here, to articulate the basic notion, which Buddhism seems to find so plain and natural, and of which not one Western psychology seems to have the least understanding: In every psychological movement of desire or attraction towards something, there is an equal and opposite instinctual aversion (ranging from cool antipathy to visceral revulsion) from the perceived contrary of the object of desire. E.g., "All is dross that is not Rosalind." This is of fundamental importance in understanding particularly the male psychologies of exclusive homosexuality and exclusive heterosexuality--which, in terms of any Western psychology of desire-only, are inexplicable. I could go on--and I will.....

Think of the Bach motets, with and without instrumental doubling, from which Mozart said he could learn something: What Mozart didn't notice is that they turn the human voice into a completely mechanical instrument (in a way that he, for one--despite what Toscanini said about Don Giovanni--never did) and the effect is ghastly; rather like embalming somebody, and achieving that "desirable, life-like appearance," before he's dead. Or like (as the Japanese sometimes do) hanging artificial, paper cherry blossoms on living cherry trees. Not like the genial imitations, say, of crickets and frogs, using human voices, that Josquin and English and Italian madrigalists sometimes indulge in; which manage both to astonish and to please, and never to lose their intrinsic vocality.

It may be, after all, that I quite wrongly misunderstand and captiously fail properly to appreciate German Idealism (which I take to be the erection of illiberal personal prejudices into universal generalities)...though I rather think I've got this one right. To be fair, however, I herewith promise that I will seek out someone who has read and understood, and found merit, in Kant and Hegel, and ask him to explicate and justify their seemingly barbarous jargon and (as I say) illiberal philosophies--in terms, of course, of rational humanism.

Meantime, I've been pursuing my readings in Buddhism; now reviewing the development of Mahayana Buddhism, beginning with the Lotus Sutra, finding in it that which speaks to my heart. And trying meanwhile to listen to Bach's St. John Passion: Noxious morbidity. I infinitely prefer Bach's Latin vocal music to his German; and even more infinitely prefer Vivaldi's vocal music to Bach's. Need I say why?

And yet, and yet...It's less that I cannot understand Kant than that I am unwilling to understand him: His character (pedantic, snobbish, illiberal, utterly humorless), to begin with, disgusts me--And even if I agree that most truths are what I call moral truths, and that we are (if we are susceptible to the claims of charm, wit, character/personality, benevolence, beauty, gallantry, honor, and the wearing of learning lightly) obliged to believe them, I will not have them prescribed, or even described, to me (in so insupportable a manner) by anyone whom I so fundamentally dislike and distrust as the odious Emmanuel Kant. Not even by his witty ("Abit onus, obit anus") apologist Schopenhauer--who, after all, in his writing, is a pedantic bore. It isn't till we get to Nietzsche, that German moral philosophy takes wing; and then, though I frequently wince and sometimes shudder, I laugh and am persuaded.

My discriminating mind leading the way, I picked up a book called The Skeptical Tradition in consequence of the issues raised in my last blog, and read backwards to the Greeks and forward to Kant, from a reassuring essay on "The Implications of Hume's Skepticism." And I'm prepared to make my peace with Buddha upon the following terms. (1) Understanding that the ancient humans he was preaching to were far simpler and less scientific than I am. (2) While granting that the "discriminating mind" is in fact, as judge and preceptor, the source of endless error; yet, as a tool of perception and dispassionate analysis, it is the god-given light of the universe. (3) The reason given, apparently by Buddha himself, for not believing the "three errors" (belief in Destiny, belief in a Pancreator, belief in the Hegemony of Hazard), that "he who believes in them will be demotivated either to seek the good or eschew evil," are simply not applicable to one who, like me, believes that good is to be sought and evil eschewed, respectively, for their own sakes. By the way, I understand nothing of Kant's philosophy; I cannot make it make sense to me, however doggedly and bitterly I pursue the reading and the explication of it; I suspect actually that, like Freudianism and Hegelianism, it really doesn't make any kind of coherent sense, and is merely and purely, deliberately and fraudulently, obfuscatory blather.

Reading lately L'Enseignement du Bouddha published in 1966 by the Fondation pour la promotion du Bouddhisme (Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai) in Tokyo, just to see if it translates. It does. But I've run across an "error" (if that's what it is) in my Buddhism, which, si je m'y cramponne, will prevent my ever finding an issue en ce monde: Affirming that everything comes from hasard, without cause or condition. Absolutely, having long ago read David Hume's withering analysis of cause and effect, and absorbed much positivist philosophy since, I do believe, without thinking about it much, that chance and uncertainty govern the universe, and that causality (in any sense other than habitual association) can never be demonstrated. And, I mean, how primitive, how Aristotelian, how quaint to assume that it ever could be demonstrated. Jesus. And to assert that so soberly rational a refusal to believe in causality is an error of the same order as a belief in Destiny or a Pancreator is, to my avowedly Occidental discriminating mind, disgustingly sloppy thinking. I thought Buddha had more sense.

Read for the first time today of the first great Chinese sage of tea, Lu Yu (whose treatise on tea I am determined to read--implying, I think, that I must start hanging out in the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii; even perhaps enrolling as a grad student): What a character not unlike my own! An orphan raised by a Buddhist monk, whose natural inclination is secular literature and Confucianism! That's me to a tee.

Too much of my life has been spent trying to get back into things that I've outgrown and can no more re-inhabit than a butterfly can re-enter its chrysalis. Cases in point being my trying to continue in a masters program at the same university from which I'd got my Bachelor's; and my trying to continue in the tutelage of Dr. Chanida. At the end of today's session I said (a propos of what it really doesn't matter), "What you have just said to me is ridiculous, false, and judgemental. Reflect on that and be prepared to discuss at our next meeting." She said she would.

'Tanyrate, I've been thinking about formulating an ethic for myself. After several false starts, I've begun to realize that most of what I believe in are negatives--at least from a putative female perspective (why not?). After the "Big Bang" of positive caring, reverence and deference for (1) the sick and afflicted (not, of course, for those creatures who afflict themselves; not, that is to say, for neurotic women); and for (2) children (magna reverentia, as I like to say, pueris debetur) and the young of all species-not-evil-by-nature--baby elephants being notably adorable; and for most kinds of animals--after that gush of positivity--then a deliberate and detached cooling, hostility even, to the other-directed tenets of prevailing, particularly Christian, ethics: Most especially I do not believe in the self-congratulatory, self-regarding (masquerading as altruistic) Christian ethic of "Love" and "Forgiveness." "Get off us," I like to say, "with your intrusive, who-needs-it? Caritas. Let's have a little respect from you, liking, appreciation, understanding, willingness to let be, disinterested friendliness. And who cares what you forgive?--as long as you don't go around forgiving (for them) crimes and outrages against innocents.

Coming back from lunch through the grounds of the Iolani Palace, I saw a contingent (a couple of dozen) of what appeared to be young Japanese sailors, in white summer ducks, strolling about taking pictures of the palace and the banyan trees, their uniforms sparkling, tight around their bottoms in way that U.S. naval uniforms have not been for twenty years: rather startling, charming and funny.