by Yohan J. John

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

—Alan Watts

Some years ago I had my third eye opened. I was spending the summer in Bangalore, doing an undergraduate physics project at the National Aerospace Laboratories. I was staying with my sister's friend, and his landlady insisted that I participate in something called the “Kyudo ceremony”. My friends warned me that she was a bit of a kook — her house was filled with nude self-portraits in garish colors and flattering proportions — but out of sheer curiosity I acquiesced. The landlady whisked me away on her scooter to a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood that doubled at a Japanese Buddhist temple of some sort. In the waiting room, one of the assistants (devotees? students? acolytes?) asked me my name, which she carefully wrote on a very thin piece of paper. No explanations were offered. I was then taken to the main prayer hall, i.e., the living room. There was an altar, atop which say a statue of the Buddha, a few packets of biscuits, and a bunch of bananas. The priest who led me through the ceremony was a little old Japanese lady who communicated via a plump and slightly nervous-looking Indian translator. I stood and knelt and mumbled as instructed, occasionally wishing I had a translator for the translator. At one point the piece of paper with my name on it was set aflame —a rather stylish touch, I thought.

Once another inductee was put through the motions, we were given the opportunity to learn what it is we had actually accomplished with that fifteen-minute-long ritual. A middle-aged Indian man emerged from nowhere with an instructional chart. It looked like one of those poorly drawn anatomical diagrams that are endemic to Indian schools. But instead of anatomy, we were confronted with a diagram of… eschatology. The Kyudo ceremony (I have been unable to find any mention of it on the internet) is based upon the belief that when you die, your soul will leave through one of several orifices in your body. Your rebirth (or liberation thence) depends on which hole in the body your soul evacuates from. If I remember correctly, leaving through the mouth means you come back to earth as a fish. If you leave through the nose, you are reborn as a regular land animal. If you leave through the ears, you become a bird. If you leave through the eyes, you become a sky god. This sounds like a sweet deal, but it is apparently only a consolation prize. The real goal is to leave through the third eye, and escape from the whole repetitive cycle of birth and death. But the third eye is blocked: something is needed to clear the way for the soul's egress. Normally it is your conduct — your karma — that determines this sort of thing. And Buddhism usually suggests that certain steps, like the eight-fold path, will help you break the habit of being reborn. But these Kyudo folks believe that their ceremony is a shortcut to transcendence.

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“(Swifts) feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air.
They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on
the ground.”— Researcher Susanne Åkesson

Swift

I’ve been airborne since
Augustus layed the footings of the Roman Peace
……—in that alone I flew two hundred years
without alighting once. My forebear’s bodies
so studied the inclinations of drafts
they bequeathed me wings and means
to defy grounded predators (their craft
is stealth and might while mine is
lift and flight)

Angels I’ve known I met
in clouds real as the dust
of parched whirlwinds,
but sweet and wet

free in vapor we rolled and bet
that a universe of soil and stone
may last but that of blood and bone,
ligaments, limbs and breath
will be snapped as short
as the short straw
in the short-sighted lottery
of man
…………………. alone
…………………. bereft

Jim Culleny
10/30/16

by Paul Braterman

A 1929 law* imposes three unelected clergy on each of Scotland's local Education Committees. This was based on practice dating back to the 1870s, with the formation of the Scottish educational system from a merger of church and non-church elements, and to the 1918 incorporation of Catholic schools into the system. The Catholic state schools are clearly denominational, the others officially non-denominational, but all alike fall under the control of the relevant Committees. There are currently moves to free Scotland's Local Authorities from this undemocratic imposition, using Scotland's admirable Public Petition process, and you can help with this (see end of post for more).

Few topics are less exciting than the mechanics of local government. Nor would I expect the world to pay much attention to the details of these mechanics in a small, only partly independent, country of no particular economic or strategic importance. Nonetheless, the case exhibits some interesting general features regarding the legacy of religion in an incompletely secularised Europe, and the realities of effecting change in a diverse and pluralist society.

The petition has attracted international attention, most notably from Michael Zimmerman, as director of the Clergy Letter Project, who in a Huffington Post article has eloquently described the current structure as “bad for science education as well as for religion”. The Clergy Letter Project itself is an impressive assemblage of over 15,000 ordained clergy, from various denominations and creeds, who argue that the correct response of religion to scientific discovery is acceptance and celebration. The image above symbolises this view, by combining the memes of DNA and Divine Creation. Accommodationism, in the best and truest sense of this much misused word.

Michael Zimmerman expresses his reasons for concern as follows:

There are many reasons why a law of this sort is inappropriate and undemocratic, and you can read most of them in the petition, but rather than focusing on those aspects of the situation, I want to address the potential for serious problems associated with science education. As we have seen in far too many instances, some with deeply held fundamentalist beliefs, beliefs that are well out of both the religious and secular mainstream of society, feel compelled to promote their narrow perspective rather than the consensus of the scientific community. These extreme views are almost always at odds with the religious beliefs that are held just as deeply by the vast majority of the religious community.

And events have shown this concern to be well justified.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

With very little international attention, a major terrorism trial is entering its final stage in Munich, Germany. Beate Zschäpe, the only survivor of a right-wing terrorism trio, is facing charges of complicity in ten homicides, two bomb attacks, and 15 armed robberies, as well as membership in a terrorist organization, attempted murder, and arson. The victims are mostly people with a Muslim migration background. If the situation had been reversed with a “Muslim” group assassinating “Germans” for over a decade, then international interest would most likely have trumped the reporting on the recent Paris or Brussels attacks. This attentional asymmetry is in many ways also what the trial is about.

Over the course of more than a decade, the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” (NSU) managed to go on a killing spree across the country, and, in some troubling sense, they did so on the government's watch. Germany's domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) was aware of the right wing terror cell before they went underground in 1998 and began their series of assassinations. And yet, for more than a decade, the police who were investigating the individual murder cases never considered the possibility of a right wing background as a motivation for the killings. Instead, in all of the various instances, the police only investigated the assumed criminal backgrounds of the victims as possible leads, presuming hidden ties to some Turkish mafia or criminal masterminds abroad. When people from the Turkish community suspected xenophobic motives, they were labeled as conspiracy theorists, as police documents show. The media went along with these assumptions and reported accordingly, and we all ate it up. The extent not only of right wing terror in Germany, but also of stupefying institutionalized racism in the Verfassungsschutz and the police, major fuck ups in the investigations, and collective blindness slowly came to light since 2011. All of this happened before the recent rise of the new right in Germany and elsewhere that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

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by Elise Hempel

Recently, needing a change from my standard breakfast of yogurt, I decided to make myself a nice omelet with cheddar cheese and tomatoes. Not having made an omelet for many months now, I'm out of practice a bit, but everything was going fine, my omelet cooking nicely in our cast-iron pan – not sticking, not burning, looking restaurant-pretty. I was almost done, almost ready to perform the fold, and then…. And then somehow, suddenly, I had a combination of omelet and scrambled eggs, or what, from here on out, I shall call a “scromelet.”

My partner, Ray, informed me a few months ago that this “linguistic blend of words” (Wikipedia) – not to be confused with a compound, in which both/all of the spliced-together words remain fully intact – is called a “portmanteau” (port-man-toe), a term I'd never heard before. My 2002 American Heritage college dictionary defines “portmanteau” first as “a leather suitcase with two hinged compartments” and goes on to define a “portmanteau word.” And a British website tells me that the word “portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau originating from the French word “portemanteau” which blends “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (cloak). A further look at Wikipedia also reveals another interesting fact – that the term “was first used in this context by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871).”

Little did I know that I'd been creating portmanteaus for many years already. And since the term has come up, Ray and I can't seem to stop ourselves from creating them almost continuously. For instance, our dog, Groucho (neither “cockapoo” nor “puggle” but, as genetic testing revealed, a combination of Akita, greyhound and boxer, or a “groxita”), who likes to lie (with his front paws crossed) across the threshold between the porch and the living-room, or between the dining-room and the kitchen, is now a “threshound.”

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by Maniza Naqvi

For the past eight years, when I walk past it in the early mornings on my way to work, I've imagined the elegant, refined, educated, decent family that currently lives in the White House. They look so good and they talk so fine. A made for TV family. Making most of us feel good and feel great. Making America look good. I always pause at dusk to gaze at their residence, on my way home and think how lovely it seems because of them inside it. Change is coming. They are leaving soon.

But beyond the poetry and photogenic poise they don't matter. And whoever comes in after they are gone from here, won't matter either. The change won't matter. The incoming scandals won't matter. No one who lives here ever does. Matter. Much. You live here as a servant. No, not of the people.

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by Christopher Bacas

After Allen fired Mike, I replaced him the next Friday night. Mike showed up for the gig anyway. That's how we first met. He was not tall, solid, short grey hair, onyx eyes, and all Baltimore: the accent, the indestructible Hunky genetics, the edge that let you know it might get real, right now. Before he spoke, he cleared his throat; that reflexive grunt, grammatically sound and ever present. His voice wasn't just gritty, it came out in cinderblocks; the kind with corners shorn, that scuffed skin off your palms when you picked them up. He often used the word bark. It described a responsive saxophone (“that horn barked”), the ability to play something (“you barked off those fourths”), or an aggressive person (“they barked at me, but fuck 'em!”). Mike's voice barked, too.

I was uncomfortable walking in on his gig. Allen was solid on his invitation. Earlier in the week, on the phone, he precisely quoted, in Bela Lugosi accent, Lenny Bruce's bit where a junkie jazz musician gets a gig with Lawrence Welk:

“you're perfect boy for my band…..YOU'RE DEAF….we play a lotta college dates,mostly industrial colleges.”

Selling me on a fifty-dollar-a-night weekend gig in menagerie of drunks. With travel, it amounted to seven hours.

Immediately, I said yes.

Before the drive to Baltimore, Allen invited me into his apartment. He lived alone and was raising two sons with a combative ex. It smelled of sandalwood inside. A Ben Webster record was playing. Allen always taught me, even things I thought I already knew. Ben shaped notes with exquisite varieties of breath: some had glowing El Greco halos, others popped like champagne corks or made panting dives into nothingness. I knew his sound, but hearing his loving care was the night's first lesson.

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