American Memorial Day in China
I have mentioned to some of you -before about my first meeting with author Linda Leonard. It was not long before she published her third book Witness to the Fire. She came to an all day lecture of mine on Creativity and Wellness in Snowmass, Colorado a few years ago. She told me she was there to interview me on Creativity and the Creative Process. I did not know who she was at the time—that she was Dr. Leonard, had already published two underground bestsellers, and was a Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology in Jungian studies. What I did quickly discover that she was hard-wired to a separate reality and lived/lives on “the edge of the abyss” and that I had nothing new to tell her. She had revelations to impart to me: She spoke to me as only Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, Li-Young Lee (son of Mao’s personal physician) and a few others have in my life. I was, and still am, in deep and appreciative awe.
She helped me to name the place I had so often visited: The abyss is that place of “terrifying beauty”, magnificent thirst and eager sorrow that even we poets journey toward when the muse calls us there to create. And we create art all the while fearing we will never return from this mysterious precipice. It is a place where everything and nothing seems to be a metaphor for "the gravedigger's forceps" and the awesome brevity of life
It has been such a week.
A student at the University jumped to his death from the eighth floor and died only a few feet from where I was normally scheduled to lecture. It was a rare day off from class for me.
Since then, students and faculty have come to the far corner of that building, each seemingly with their own reason: Some came to visit death, some stopped to to re-enact in their minds the actions the student took. And perhaps a few others came to re-form some eschatology in a once spiritualy rich culture now practically stripped of any way to conceptualize an afterlife.
It has been a time to reflect on my own mortality and to reaffirm my gratitude for what has been freely given to me and for that which has kept me alive in difficult times: friends, triumph over pain and loss, art, and my love for teaching…
I watched a wonderful movie The Legend of 1900. It is a fanciful romance written by the director of my favorite movie of all time: Cinema Paradiso.
It is a movie about a brilliant musician, born on a cruise ship, who never leaves the confines of the boat.
Shortly after, I had dinner with a young Chinese couple—so bright and brimming with ambition and curiosity—and learned that they were a kind of storybook romantic couple: He abandoned the quiet countryside he adored to come win her hand here in the third largest city in China. I found out from them that Chinese country folk must have tangible and needed skills in order to even apply for a permit to live in a metropolis. And once here they might never be granted permission to leave again. Only love or greed has such power to draw a man so far from his roots. The Japanese ridiculed such people near the middle of the 19th Century by calling them hototogisu, “cuckoos” because they came in search of wealth (nests) already established by Edo (Tokyo) residents. But he came for love and now , though happily amidst it, the young teacher still pines for his family and a gentler territory some two days away by train. They both may be on this ship for a great many years. If I liked and valued them before, I am now an ardent admirer and hold them in the highest regard.
Tomorrow, America’s Memorial Day, I will watch a group of native singers and dancers from Tibet. I have seen them before, albeit briefly, in Hong Kong and on the streets here in Guangzhou whirling and clapping in enviable reverie. Despite that, I am sure I will feel that strange melancholy I associate with anything Tibetan because of the massacres there and the complete lack of knowledge the Chinese populous has of the sorrows that existed during Tibet’s time with the Dalai Lama. Last week I met a troubled former soldier who expressed pain at not being able to speak openly about his part in certain atrocities.
The government, like most governments, has buried these secrets well.
The best in art, music and dance has always grown out of suffering or worship--or both. I will try to cherish both aspects of their cultural display.
Somehow all of this made sense to me in some big intuitive flash of love, culture, humanity, creation and passing and I imagined that they came to me like ancient notes, history and remembrance, barely audible on a long traveled breeze.
I have often quoted or paraphrased Dostoevsky and his assertion that man is a pliable animal, able to become accustomed to anything. But, this weekend is, for me, about remembering those things past and present that were sadly precluded any acclimation.
It is a time to meditate on a single bite of food and be grateful. It is a time to travel, if only in my mind, to someplace wonderful and then wish it for someone else.
LON
