My Generation - A Response to Maureen Dowd

In Response to Maureen Dowd's NYT article, 'Who Do We Think We Are?'

My generation isn’t as enthusiastic about technology as the pundits of an older generation seem to think. They talk of our Facebook self-consciousness, our endless hours wasted looking at corgi butts on Buzzfeed, and our sense of 1920s style optimism surrounding the technology boom we see expanding like an all-encompassing Big Bang before our eyes. But they somehow miss the irony with which we engage those pastimes.

            My generation knows that those parts of our lives are superficial. We spend a minute or two looking at them, like we used to watch cartoons when we were kids, and then we turn our conversations to questions of global justice, the environment, the problems of sexual identity politics, and the absurdity of patriotism in the face of a globalized outlook that is aware enough to recognize that the content of a person’s character is ultimately his or her only defining feature. We recognize tribal identification as exactly what it is: a childish form of self-aggrandizement.

            My generation looks at the bigotries of past generations and wonders how they maintained their convictions in the face of nothing but concrete evidence and experience to the contrary. We wonder why those who are older than us waste time debating whether homosexuality is a choice or not (p.s. the answer is what does it fucking matter? People fluctuate in sexuality as fickle as the weather, and whether it’s a choice or not, you learn something new about the world through the lens of a same-sex relationship). We wonder why they still talk in terms of races and stereotypes when all the people we admire most from world history represent every color and culture across the corners of the globe.

            My generation is concerned with consumerism and capitalist competition. I mean, we’re concerned about it. We admire innovative people who make the most beautiful things and solve the most difficult problems with the least amount of resources, the most ingenuity, and with the sharpest eye to sustainability. When we hear older generations telling us to buy more, waste more, and be as selfish as possible with our time and money, we look at one another with expressions like, “Who is this asshole jabbering bullshit to himself and why does he think we’re listening to him?”

            My generation thinks war is stupid. We don’t have the fuzzy peace fingers and the ingratiating folk songs of our parents’ generation. We just think war is stupid. It’s something stupid people do to gratify their own greedy ambitions. In opposition, we believe in community, but not in the stiff repressed community of nostalgic Republicans. We believe in collaboration – with likeminded people from Whogivesashitwhere on the planet Earth, for we think nationalities are as stupid as wars. We believe in hard work for small goals – growing food without poison in it, making simple, satisfying lives that benefit everyone involved, having fun with our bodies and imaginations, not what we are told to buy on TV.

            My generation is not yet wise, for we seem to have trouble overcoming a certain sense of paralysis. That said, my generation is not who our elders think we are. We understand equality not as an idealistic way to fetishize the other like old school liberals, but instead as a form of communication. We understand freedom, not as a hall pass to be self-absorbed and oppressive to everyone different from us like old school conservatives, but as an unpretentious way to live and let live.

            My generation understands that life is as simple as proverbs make it out to be, and yet there’s this whole web of complexity overlaying it that can be frustrating at times. We’re not idealistic, because the things we believe in that older people say are far-fetched are as simple as our daily experience. My generation is not defined by our technology, but instead the information about the world around us that it gives us access to. We’re not defined by the latest incarnation of a get rich quick bubble, but instead the meaning of stewardship for the land and one another. We’re sick of our elders’ insistence on a life of consumptive alienation. We’re defined by our desire and our efforts to find a better way to live.

In Sunsets

There is a special texture

to the inspiration

that arises from sunsets:

It’s calm and quiet

like a pond

when the fish are

not hungry;

It suffuses the air with an air

of distance,

and makes the artist view

the world

through a squint.

Everything seems to go quiet

at sunset,

like a sweet and enclosed lull

between the clamor of day

and the clamor of night.

When I think of telling a story

to be proud of,

it seems to me

that somehow

at sunset,

it is

always

already

told in full.

Porch of Chrysalis House

2127 16^th St

Boulder, CO

7:28 PM

03/23/2014

On Freedom and Fences

            There once was a study conducted on school children. They took two groups out to a playground and let them play however they chose. One playground had a fence containing it. The other did not. The group that was taken to the playground with the fence behaved as children often do: they took up the space. They spread out, formed their different games, marched and hunted along the fenceline, climbed the fence; explored the nooks and the crannies.

With the other group, one might imagine that it would be much the same, except without a fence: the children would spill out into the world, letting their curiosities take them wherever they would; exploring every nook and every cranny. But that’s not what happened. Instead they huddled in the center of the field, playing games that mercifully allowed every one to stay as close to the pack as possible.

           

            I spent years on the road. I went everywhere.  I hitchhiked, I worked, I explored, I couchsurfed, I made love, I read books, and I let my heart dictate each movement I made. The only fences I had were my remaining funds and vague, abstract preconceptions of what I wanted to be doing, who I was trying to become. How romantic, right? 

            The experience taught me something completely unexpected: the world is too big. And being too big, it becomes too small.

When I look back on how I spent my years on the road I am mostly appalled by my lack of imagination. Having nothing but free time and the freedom to go anywhere, to do anything (so long as I had the funds and the courage), I now realize that it caused me to shut down and fill my time with invented deadlines for finishing books, catching trains, arriving in new cities, seeing sites I hardly cared about. I was neurotically collecting places in a desperate attempt to fill the empty space. I was as a child huddling in the middle of a field, except the huddle was my own thoughts and the field was a body in such constant movement that it masked the truth of its stasis.

             In the face of doing so little with my unending time, I began to resent my freedom. I could literally go anywhere and do anything (a dream come true!) and I was doing almost nothing of any significance. That resentment led to a cynicism towards all the places of the world as a kind of childish scapegoating: everywhere was basically the same, people are people wherever you go, dehumanizing commerce rules everything, and it’s the world’s (or at least the modern age’s) fault for not being able to offer anything of substance for me to sink my teeth into.

The world became too small. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do that offered any real escape from an essential panic that surrounded just moving through the world as an unattached visitor. When you have nothing at stake in a place, it becomes just another 'here' where you need to find food, shelter, entertainment, and maybe a little conversation (which, incidentally, when you’re cynical, all conversations start to feel the same – that is to say: futile).

I tried to tell myself that God was in the details. If I only paid more attention to what was happening around me, then I could appreciate it all better. But that wasn’t the case. No matter how rich the storylines of places proved to be, they always seemed to just be playing out tired old archetypes that reinforced how boring the modern world had really become. I felt like I was trying and trying, but only managing to tire myself out and prove my own sad incompetence (which compounded the resentment all the more) in the process.    

But then I had a breakthrough: I started building fences: fences around plots of land, plots of life: I made commitments: projects, timelines, and responsibilities. Things I couldn’t just float through, but had to rise to the occasion for. Challenges. For once, I didn’t have all the freedom in the world. And it was like the world had somehow filled with color, with nuance. It started to feel like everything was inverted from what it had been. Before, everything was possible so nothing was interesting. Now, because I was stuck with one thing, it became a pathway to better understanding everything else. Small things began to feel terribly significant, like metaphors for the world as a whole. And I found that they could absorb me.

            Some people have told me they found my lifestyle of hitchhiking in supposedly dangerous places to be courageous. Perhaps there was one kind of courage involved in that, but I’ve never given it much credit myself. It didn't feel courageous. Instead, it felt like an unending process of just passing through here and there, time and time again. Where’s the courage in that? Real courage, I've come to feel, is in committing to somewhere, be it a place, a community, a family, a job, and in seeing it through. I don't believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. More often than not, that just proves to be paralyzing. Real freedom comes in renouncing one’s freedom and in building a fence. It's within a contained life that one can grow and build and learn and explore. But mostly, participate in an authentic way.

Saturday, March 8th, 2014
The Laughing Goat
Boulder, CO

New American Kirtan by Michael Zeligs (Album Review)

Today is the release date of Michael Zeligs’ much anticipated newest album, “New American Kirtan” (download it for free here). It is the culmination of many years of work that Michael has spent mastering his voice, honing his message, and clarifying his intentions as a musician. First, I would like to discuss what those intentions are, and then I would like to open up to a larger meditation on the function of spiritual music in the 21^st century.

            Michael has long spoken of his vision of group-oriented performances in sacred spaces from cathedrals to forests to temples to homes to the open air of the plains and deserts. He imagines great choruses where everyone joins in, everyone’s voice counts, everyone feels a sense of belonging, and everyone experiences the chorus of which they are a part as nothing short of a prayer. It is with that in mind that he has released this album, which he describes as “the roadmap” to “going to work with groups and raise the bar on audience participation.”  

            The album is forty-five minutes long and consists of six songs. Each song is a slow, richly layer meditation that adheres closely to a single message which it conveys gradually, with patience and a building sense of heart-penetration. The instrumentation is carefully sparse, controlled to create the powerful foundation of an atmosphere upon which the lyrics, delivered in Michael’s angelic singing voice can remain the focus. Michael’s voice resonates so strongly, in fact, it almost feels like he’s singing a cappella. Each song is saturated with a deeply-felt message of spiritual hope, faith, and work (which Michael considers inseparable from love).

Each song on the album (but the early ones in particular) follow a specific narrative, which can be summarized in three parts: wandering lost, finding direction and working hard to follow it, arrival at our collective destiny. This is a storyline as old as scripture. In Om Shrim Ganesha, the first song on the album, the first verse relies on imagery of a sailor lost at sea. He or she experiences the turbulence of the waves and the hopelessness of having nothing but sea surrounding him or her in all directions. He or she is searching for a route to follow home to solid ground. The second verse describes a bird taking flight, both by the beat of its wings and with the aid of the wind carrying it along. It ultimately finds true north and follows it unswervingly to its destiny. The third verse describes Michael’s oft-dreamt of chorus singing together “in fierce voices” in praise of the divine: the homecoming. The album’s second song, Oh Divine Gardener, follows the same story. Michael first calls out for help and guidance: “Divine gardener, help me see there’s a place for me in all of this”. He then sings of following the signs of the gardener’s work “hot on your trail in my dance of bliss”, and it leads to the eternal chorus sang this time as “All shall join us in our joyous avenue/ In cadence with the soul melting melody/ The music of the spirit”.

I’m interested in this narrative of wandering lost, finding direction, and homecoming because I think it tells us a lot about the function of spiritual music in the 21^st century, particularly in the United States. Michael himself is a major player in a growing movement of spiritual revivalists not only in the Bay Area, but across the rest of the country. The movement comes out of a sense of aimlessness and materialistic emptiness that seems to permeate much of our culture. Like the sailor lost at sea, looking for a way home to solid ground, we’re lost in a sea of alienating, mechanizing consumerism, and are searching for a spiritual tradition that we can actually believe in and use as a solid foundation on which to build the rest of our lives. As I’ve often heard those of my generation put it: “the life we’re supposed to be living” which always feels like it’s right around the corner, but is never (or rarely) our actual lived experience.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’re a culture naturally skeptical of old dogmatic traditions, we have a scientific, materialist outlook toward metaphysics, and the more we are exposed to the various ways of being, the less any one of them seems to be able to support their claims to Objective Truth. And so we drift, trying to do some work here, trying to do some there. So many of us complain that we don’t know what to do with our lives, don’t have a solid foundation. So many complain of the loneliness that has come with the breakdown of strong community and so many activists burn out quickly as their efforts seem futile in the face of a massive machine, unfazed by all the hard work they have done.

The message for the 21^st century spiritual practitioner seems to be twofold: do the work you love and it will carry you like a bird flapping its wings; have faith in the flow of life (the divine) and it will carry you like a gust of strong wind. The goal is always the same: it’s about returning home (which Michael calls True North). What is home? Home is community. Home is a sense of purpose and participation. Home is a meaningful existence.

Michael is careful not to preach any specific dogma in his music, only to describe the process of connecting with the sacred, which seems to me (and I’m quick to disclaim that this is definitely just my own interpretation) to really just be the process of feeling at home in one’s own life: to love life and the world around us, to enjoy the unfolding process, and to have faith that the world knows better than we do what it’s all about.

One final topic I want to discuss before I wrap up is the role of Sanskrit on “New American Kirtan”. Kirtan obviously conjures up Sanskrit and Hinduism from the start, and there are a couple songs that include Sanskrit phrases. To me, this is all intended to posit the album where Michael wants it to be: It’s not a Hindu album, it’s an American one. The songs are in English and they involve synthesized beats, beat box, and other instruments one would have a hard time finding in Mother India. But the tradition is still there. Kirtan is participatory. Songs in kirtan can last ages and are endlessly repetitive, often with the same mantra over and over for the better part of an hour. Kirtan is devotional, but it’s also meditative for the practitioner. It’s a vehicle by which to communicate with the Divine and return to a sense of embodied hope that can inspire an individual to shake off some of the dust from his or her life and live the way they always subconsciously knew they wanted to. Michael is attempting to replicate that feeling but in a reinvented way that speaks to the American audience he intends to be working with. Sanskrit references enable him to pay homage to the genre, but his usage of English enables him to make it fully his own. And for that, Michael deserves a lot of respect.

          Ultimately, this kind of spiritual music is not about religion or dogma, but instead the feeling of community, uplifting sounds that fill a listener with optimism and courage to step forward from out of the rut of confusion in order to live the life he or she really wants. The music inspires one to look inward and participate in the beauty of the world. Michael’s new album is beautiful, just as his voice is beautiful, and today, the release date, is an important and exciting day.    

hallways

hallways

Now, here our hero of the moment recourses

to

recurse through old writings in his mind:

            specifically,

retaling empty tales, contented

            with wishes

            for what he would have willed to’ve done,

Each moment an empty room breaking off a dimly lit

            (and sparcely furnished)

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

            - in desperate need of inventive elaborations

                                    (fictions, dreams, [op/ex/im]posable potentialities, lies)

“I stepped into a bar in Paris in need of a glass of water…”

(what followed was what is now needed to have followed. now. not then. the

            taling is in the

                        telling)

02/02/2014 1:30 AM

Chrysalis House

Boulder, CO