Category Archives: Uncategorized

Traveler’s Song

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

here’s a song I wrote way back, it’s sung from the point of view of a tragic hero of some story. In that story he sets out from his childhood home, a small fishing village on the Penumbric coast, journeys across vast forests, mountain ranges, plains and wastes, having all sorts of adventures, some triumphant, and some painful lessons that leave their scars. He discovers a fairy world of wonder and marries a member of the fae species. They live a happy life together, or happy as life gets, it has it’s ups and downs. Then one day he wakes up to find all of it gone.

Picture a 1980s era fantasy novel cover with a figure wearing a crimson tunic, tan breeches and buckskin boots standing in a small clearing on an otherwise forested knoll, holding the reins of a horse and looking out over an expanse. There’s gold embossed writing on the cover, “Sandors Trail.” That’s the world this is being sung from. It’s sung in a gentle, winsome, Greensleevesesque tune. Oh, and for some reason, although it is pre-mechanized tech world, they have saccharine. Magic? Without further ado…

Traveler’s Song

My family, friends and lovers have all been fae
And from their tales I’ve built my home
My family, friends and lovers are all fairies
And I’ve always known
A time would come one day
when they’d return beneath the earth from whence they came

So now my home is gone
The mirrored walls have fallen in
Into the people I might have been
Without your stories I’m left with nothing to believe
No, I never had something up my sleeve
No hooks to hang a map
No blueprints laid to build it back

I stand here empty handed
Full of doubts about the creature I’ve become
Staring at the lifelines I’ve undone
Grasping at the shadows of empty cups
Long outgrown the saccharine taste of the stuff
That kept me running in circles so long
Tethered here for all my days dreaming
Until last night I woke up screaming
Alone and naked to with no home
Old and battered to the bone

One last circle round this open grave before I go
And I confess to the gap
Between what you gave and what I stole
To get here I sold it all along the way
Now there’s no here left to stay
Nowhere left to go but forward
So forward I must face
Today I leave the ghost of this place
Without a road to follow
Without the benefit of signs to guide my way
Stepping off
Stepping off to what I cannot say

Cold

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

Late November rain cold
Hot water ran out in the shower cold
Fruit pop from the way-way back of the freezer cold
Gotta get out of bed at 6am and you left the damn window open cold
Looked right through you like you weren’t even there cold
Pouring down your lungs and sucking out your breath cold
Ungodly cold
You’re only with him ‘cause he’s got a nice house cold
Banks Alaska in the forever night of December cold
Sheriff evicting a disabled veteran for a missed mortgage payment cold
I’m just doing my job cold
Liquid nitrogen cold
Cold enough to shatter teeth cold
I guess this is it cold
Holding out for one more day cold
then another

Warm

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

Fresh baked bread warm
Homemade lentil soup warm
Lying in the sun warm
Pruning up in the tub warm
Juuust another minute warm
Warm to the bone warm
Long car trip with friends warm
That’s my favorite song warm
Well-worn fuzzy sweater warm
Lover holds you tight warm
Feeling safe from harm warm
Helping someone out warm
Late August afternoon warm
Writing it down warm
Reading over what you wrote again and again warm
The rhythm and the flow warm
Moving words around warm
It all falls into place warm
Up on stage and now it’s real warm
Look them in the eyes warm
Silence, heartbeat now warm

Ronnie

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

Ronnie

The way it felt
fire warmed
when you called me “loving stuff”
the studied grace with which you told my mom “enough”

Cape Cod, night beach
chill wind whistles past
alone together
green sea glass
out in the cold surf
islands of our visit
clams bubble just below the surface
you always listened

Now we speak in birthday cards
and filling the blank space is hard

The Second Ugliest Building in the World

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

The second ugliest building in the world sits slumped in an industrial playground of crab grass and Russian thistle. Brown tufts and tumbleweeds dry between hastily dumped debris. A child’s plastic shopping cart lays on its side, yellow basket, plastic wheel spinning. The cellophane from an old cigarette pack clinging to a blade of grass. Bottles in a rille. Chain link cut down low and folded over, hidden by someone they tried to pen in.

Identical rooms: efficiency, blue standing shower, toilet, 2 burners and a dripping yellow fridge, wall to wall carpet worn to the quick. Is this so bad? It keeps you warm, it gets you clean, it stores your food and clothes and the things that fall between the dresser and the wall. The second ugliest building in the world doesn’t wait for an answer.

Empty or occupied, it holds itself erect. Through Moscow snow and wind, baking in the summer haze. Today it is unseasonably warm. Efficient, graffiti adorned, half abandoned, black windows, curtains flapping in the breeze, torn. The laughter of children threatening to turn into something else. It’s cloudy now, muffled thunder and the first warm drops of rain cutting the dust. It’s too humid to run.

There Is No There There

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

“There Is No There There” — Gertrude Stein

I believe the most fundamental Buddhist insight, the one from which all other Buddhist insights emanate is that of interdependent co-arising (PratÄ«tyasamutpāda). Simply stated, this means that no phenomena exist independently of other phenomena. This isn’t to say that if everything didn’t exist in the form it currently exists nothing would exist. That would be ridiculous and easy to disprove, all you would have to do is cut down a tree and wait for the rest of the Universe to unravel. What it means is that reality is an irreducible totality because if you take any aspect of reality (a tree, the sun, an insect, a skin cell, a photon and so on) and examine it closely enough you will find it is an aggregate form. That is, every phenomena is made up of smaller constituent phenomena and that those phenomena are in turn made up of constituent phenomena and so on ad infinitum. As you approach infinity these constituent phenomena become less and less ‘there’ – they pop in and out of existence at the level[s] of quantum foam[1], until at a certain point you have dissected reality right out of existence. This isn’t only true for phenomena we think of as objects but also processes, such as perceptions and feelings and all causes and effects across space-time. This is what is meant by all things being empty. The implication of this is that there is no reliable base unit of measurement, not even the whole because it is, ultimately, made up of a whole lot of nothing. It is only in the reality of inter-being that anything exists at all.

This applies to the concept of the self. We like to think of ourselves as being real in and of ourselves. The fact that there is an aggregate form from which our consciousness arises makes this a difficult illusion to see through. We are born, we exist, and we will die. Those are all undeniable realities. But we are dying and being reborn on a cellular level all the time. Where’s their baby shower? Where’s their funeral? This sounds silly, but we are just as much an aspect of an irreducible reality as our cells are. We are also as dependent on our cells for our existence–including our ability to conceive of a self or no-self–as our cells are dependent on the atoms that make them up. Taking this to its logical extreme, we can be no more said to exist in and of ourselves then the sub-quantum nothing we are ultimately made up of.

This fundamental insight deprivileges the self–whether conceived of as body or consciousness–as the fundamental unit of reference. This is what is meant in Buddhism by ‘escaping the cycle of birth and death.’ It does not mean some kind of essential immortality in spirit or soul.[2]

It would be foolish to ignore the significance of individual bases of perceptions, conceptions and (inter)actions; you have to eat and drink and sleep if you want to go on living in your current aggregate form/existing in a state of self-awareness. It is from these bases that we must operate, but we can do so in a way that recognizes the non-independence and ultimate emptiness of the self.

In sum, it is inaccurate to think of oneself and others as discrete phenomena because there is no corporeal essence. So I guess another way of saying what I’ve been trying to say is: “there is no us here.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
_________________________________________________________________
1. Although the scientific terminology I am using are modern creations as are the specific theories, these concepts were all implied, and in many cases referenced by other names, in Buddhist thought. I’m not a Buddhist scholar nor am I all that interested in what specific words were used by whom or the correct pronunciation, or any other traditional knowledge signifiers for that matter, so you will have to take this reasoning on its own merit, or not, whatev~

2. There seems to be some inconsistencies on this in at least some Buddhist doctrine in terms of a vehicle for karmic transmission that periodically manifests in conscious and corporeal form as human (and in some discussions/traditions as animals, demons, hungry-ghosts, demi-Gods and such). I believe this is a misunderstanding of the core Buddhist insights and its implications resulting from an incomplete conceptual disassociation from the ego in conceiving the nature of reality.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bonus mini-essay

On Terrence McKenna and the fetishization of the individual

I am beginning to wonder whether an unintentional fetishization of the individual haunted the back of Terrence McKenna’s ideas.
The individual is definitively a useful point of reference from which to analyze and talk about the Universe; however, I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument as to why even the very thing that gives us a conception of the self as individual–our consciousness–is anything but the synergistic effects of constituent parts, which can themselves be broken down into infinitely smaller parts, although at a certain sub-sub-atomic level this is purely a conceptual exercise due to the limits of technology.

While it can and has been argued that the experience of consciousness is itself an argument for the primacy of the individual as a unit of measurement; from what I understand we are not self-contained units, we could not exist outside of the societies that make our (re)production and acquisition of basic needs possible, nor could we exist without the smaller biological entities–who have their own DNA and systems of recreation–that make up the bulk of “our” body mass. What differentiates the individual, who would not exist without the collective in which she lives from the animals in our gut, who could not live without us and without which we could not live?

360 BPS

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

I am
my friends
you
and the rest of them
all
struggling to keep up
drowning under the weight of too much stuff.

Things
spilling out the Internet with frayed nerve rocking always-so-much-fucking-more
falling off the bloated shelves of strip mall super stores
stuffing full kitchens, beds, baths and beyond
straining, groaning closet doors.

Racing down manic caffeine spirals
dizzy with excess
texting, tripping, driving way too fast
speaking in tongues, dripping
spitting out half chewed trash
never stopping except for Stopping Class
coming soon, just you wait
shh, grab a seat in the back…you’re late.

Mom

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

Mom,

You were born to a mother
In and out of the hospital
And by “hospital” I mean psychiatric facility
And by “psychiatric facility” I mean off-white walls
Blinking neon-lights
The slick of piss on the floor
Moans behind cracked doors.
She hits you like a stranger
Eyes blank of recognition
Bites you, kicks you
Curses you and your father
As you drag her
Screaming
Out of the house
Again.
You never had a mother
You had a sick older sister
An open wound that never heals.

You live
You thrive at school
College interview, Harvard U
In a room full of mahogany and leather
He asks, eyes on your application, , “what does JYL stand for?”
“Jewish Youth League, sir.”
“Ah…I see, you’re a Jewess.”
So you go to you U Conn and get your BS.

You and Angela Davis
Teach for Herbert Marcuse in Ohio
The three of you, together, travel to California

Two weeks after your marriage
No honeymoon
Your husband is carted off to Vietnam
To return in six months time
In a bag, drapped by a flag.
No!
His body is never found
There is no bag
Only a flag
Which you burn
Forging your tears into steel
To do battle on the 6 o’clock news–
Widows against the war
“hey, hey, LBJ
How many kids did you kill today?”

You marry a strange, handsome man
Wired, with cruel eyes and a burning tongue
Who can make you laugh
He makes you laugh so hard you shoot cheap red wine right out your nose
He makes you laugh so hard you have to put the sword down.

When he shows up at your apartment
For your first date
In a 3-piece suit and tie–
San Diego, 1967–
Your roommates think he’s a narc.
He became, he remains, your co-conspirator.

You’re ABD when the head of your department
An old, white man with wolf blue eyes
Corners you in his office
And tell you he will never let you pass
“The world doesn’t need another female professor.”

So you fly to England with your husband
And birth a child
Who you never wanted
But they expect it
And, I guess, you are tired of fighting

Only you don’t get tired of fighting
Not for long
And you come back to the U.S.
And march down the beach
To the power plant
Protesting.
You, me, and Dad
Surrounded by a ragtag bunch of New Left survivors
Against a town full of lace-curtain Irish
And Italian, outer-borough refugees
Who traded in their Chevy’s for a Cadillac-ac-ac-ac
And their faith
For low taxes and good schools
Cancer money
Courtesy of the Long Island Lighting Company.

And we don’t stop there
Marching against the proxy war in El Salvador
And the early-eighties arms race suicide sprint
Détente is dead, greed is good, the dream is over
I ride on your shoulders.

And you never quit
Typing away at your dissertation
Day after day sunlight falls to shadow along your poster:
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

A decade later you march down the aisle–
Dad didn’t show
He had, “better things to do”–
Cap and gown you step
Shoulders back
Head up
Eyes on fire.
You had to soldier for everything you got.

You dole out these stories, rarely, like praise
Over cooling plates
“Just the two of us tonight, kiddo.”
You still send his mother flowers every year
You know, I never knew his name
You know, I grew up half starved, how much these dinners meant.
Mom, your love does not come cheap.

On Suffering and Compassion

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

One of if not the most important behavior affecting the quality of our life is how we react to suffering, our own and other peoples’.

As for ourselves, there are four basic models of how to react to suffering (IMHO):

1. The child/dependent model, which assumes there is another person, people, omnipotent being, anthropomorphized totality, whatever who has ultimate responsibility for our emotional and physical welfare. This model asks: How can I get someone else to take responsibility for my suffering and making it go away?

The basis for this model is the relationship of a child to hir parent. In this model it is this parent-like other who is the vehicle by which we can escape our suffering. As such, the emphasis is placed on making our suffering visible and convincing; the former requiring a willingness to forgo self-restraint and the later requiring manipulation, whether conscious of not. The fundamental reaction to suffering for this model is the preverbal wail.

This model becomes increasingly dysfunctional as one ages out of infancy. In adolescence and adulthood it leads to self-destructive, self-defeating behavior that uses one’s body and mind as a canvas and one’s life as a play for illustrating one’s suffering to the parental figure, partner, friend, community and society in radiating degrees of decreasing intensity

I’ve observed this model as a dominant reaction to suffering among people who have experienced a sustained heightened level of subjective (felt) suffering since early childhood. This effect is mediated by the amount of access a person has (or had, the earlier the interactions the more effective) to authority figures who react to suffering in more mature/enlightened ways.

2. The adolescent/revenge model, which conceptualizes the world and one’s relationship to it as a mediated/judged/refereed arena with universal rules; the ideal type sporting events, a zero-sum game on a level playing field. This model asks: How can I get redress for my suffering?

The basis of this model is the relationship of a pupil to hir teacher or other non-directly-ego-involved authority figure. The fundamental reaction to suffering for this model is, “that’s not fair!”

This model has been the most basic functional model of adult relations to suffering for at least as long as there have been nation-states. The dominance of this model is greatest in societies with a long history of authoritarian rule/systems of control (authoritarian cultures). It seems to me that up until the middle of the 20th center this was the dominant model of Europe, the United States, and other heavily settled colonies of European expansion, which is not to say that it doesn’t exist elsewhere. Since that time this model seems to be increasingly superseded by modes of relating to suffering with higher degrees of personal responsibility. This is at least in part a reaction to the devastation reaped by authoritarian regimes and their wars of expansion in the first half of the 20th century.

I’ve observed this model as a dominant reaction to suffering among people who are raised in exceptionally rigid, authoritarian environments with agreed upon rules that are more or less consistently enforced. Caveat: many people are raised in or at least heavily exposed to these environments are able to progress to modes of relating to suffering with higher degrees of personal responsibility. Whether or not someone makes this progression seems to be a matter of disposition and degree of exposure to the following models.

3. The independent individualistic liberatory model. This model asks: What can I do to free myself from this suffering?

The basis of this model is the modern conception of the individual; specifically, the citizen: An independent actor who is responsible for hir own welfare within the framework of a State and society that organizes the collective endeavors necessary for the survival of the individual. This model is strongly tied to the political philosophy of liberalism. The primacy of the individual versus society and the State varies widely depending on the version of liberalism employed, ranging from libertarianism–the minimal interference with the individual necessary to ensure hir’s potential for survival–to the various models of socialism whereby the individual is encapsulated in a State that ensures, at the very least, the survival of a society containing the array and extent of collectivities necessary for individuals to have access to food, housing, healthcare and education.

IMHO this model is a good one as it minimizes the impact of our own personal suffering on others.

There is an incrementally more highly evolved version of this model. The life lesson version, which on top of asking: What can I do to free myself from this suffering? Also asks: What did I do in the past that led me to this suffering? And: What can I do in the future to not experience this suffering?

This life lesson version of the independent individualist liberatory model is different than the other version and previously discussed models in that it sees suffering as both a default condition of the human experience and as a potentially transformative tool for escaping this condition.

In my personal experience this particular version was the most common model of relating to suffering explicitly taught; implicitly, I often learned the first and second model by example. It is still the most common model I hear expressed when the people in my life speak of their own relation to suffering (often not in so many words) or give advice as to how to relate to my own suffering. IMHO this model has a lot of merit as it not only minimizes the impact of our own personal suffering on others but also encourages the reduction of unnecessary (neurotic) suffering through accumulation of wisdom. However, as with all aspects of our accumulative ideology, it lends itself to permanent dissatisfaction as the end goal can never be met, in this case, the continued reduction of suffering in perpetuity. No matter how much one learns, no matter how much one grows, one can never escape suffering. In fact, as one grows old, even if one is able to reduce the level of unnecessary (neurotic) suffering through accumulation of wisdom, one will continue to suffer from loss–of health, physical and mental ability, friends, and autonomy.

4. The compassionate transformational model. This model asks: What can I do to transform this suffering into self-knowledge as well as understanding and compassion for other people’s suffering?

This model is fundamentally different from the previous three models as it sees suffering as a necessary and beneficial aspect of life, not for the ultimate escaping of suffering, but for the creation of compassion and actualization via the transformation of suffering.

The basis of this model is the concept of interconnectivity. In this model human beings are temporary aggregate articulations of the ultimately irreducible whole. This model is not concerned with the elimination or minimization of individual suffering, but rather the capacity for transforming suffering into compassion and in doing so help ourselves and others become more fully actualized, in turn helping to transform society into a more humane, compassionate being, and through society reduce the unnecessary suffering of all humanity and other sentient beings.

This is the model utilized in Buddhism. However, I don’t believe this model can only exist within the framework of Buddhism. All that is required to utilize this model is the decentering of the self as a unit of measurement [see “There is No There There”]. Unfortunately, that is a lot easier said than done. But if you can do this, even every once in a while, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there. And the more you do it the easier it gets.

I think we all contain a bit of each model in our psyche and react to our suffering with varying degrees of each model depending on the extent of suffering and our level of self—awareness, discipline and restraint, and the physical and psychic reserves we have to employ these tools.

I was going to try and cover models of reacting to other people’s suffering but this wound up being a much more involved, time consuming explanation than I had anticipated. So, seeing as I have lots o’ stuff to do today and I’m not getting paid for this–except by the sense of satisfaction in sharing my thoughts and maybe helping other people in their exploration of these issues–that will have to wait until another time [warning, don’t hold your breath]. In the meantime, these basic models of relating to our own suffering go a long way in explaining how we relate to other people’s suffering.

Naked

Published / by J.M. Littenberg / Leave a Comment

I am everything, and as such I am nothing
But I am also my body
Hungry, lazy, tired, cold, hot and sweaty, manic up all night thinking about lines and inflections
Or early morning gotta get up but not right now heavy cat petting sessions
Or just content, shut the flea mind down, post-meditation quiet reflection
I love you for the flavors, sights and sounds
Oh the places we go
But you know…
You have hurt me like a scar that won’t heal
Pitted, red raw
I love you but I can’t look at you too close
Ok, I’m just gonna say it —
I take my glasses off before I look in the mirror
I keep my back to the wall when I’m naked because I’ve been jumped by my own reflection too many times
Beat to the ground
Scraped knuckle asphalt skin
In pain, crawling, limping, picking up a stick to lean on, calling a friend in tears, I need a ride home

I know now-a-days we are all supposed to be so proud of our bodies
Love our bodies
Because, yes!! That’s the most radical thing a trans person can do in this culture!!!
So I try, I really do
But it becomes just another boxing match with my head
Singing me to sleep with songs of what could have been
But never will be
Because
Because I was never asked to decide
Because I couldn’t quite jump off that cliff
Because I was scared
I was twelve years old, and I was scared
I knew what was coming
I told myself this was it
Now or never
Either way I’d be an exile
The question was:
Do I get to keep my mother’s warm hands, stroking my hair, touching my face, making me eggs just the way I like them
Do I get to keep my father’s strong arms, lifting me gently from the back seat and placing me in my bed still sound asleep
Do I get to keep the quiet comfort of my dog’s understanding eyes
Do I get to keep my family?
Or do I get to leave with my body?

And I know this doesn’t make good copy
Does not sit well at all for a member of a radical, trans-fabulous organization
But I’d rather be hung by my own people
A traitor
Then slowly choke on the rope that’s been hanging around my neck
The rope that’s crushed my larynx and constricted my breath
Until I can’t even speak, only croak
And I can’t fill my lungs, only keep from blacking out
Though sometimes my head hurts so bad that blacking out is the same thing as a cradle made of angel wings
Hold me as I fall asleep to harp strings and the singing of angels

I wake up every morning
And I smile —
Twenty-four brand new hours before me
I vow to live fully in each moment
And to look at all beings with eyes of love —
And I try, I really do
Laying in my soft bed
under warm covers
Bathed in morning light
The cats crowning my head
But every morning there comes a point
when I look up from brushing my teeth or open my mouth to speak
And I feel it
The rope around my neck
Pulling me back
Back into the angry teenage room I escaped
And the silent vow I didn’t mean to make —
To never again smile with the open, sober joy of a child
I’ve twisted, contorted, struggling to free myself
But now I’ve gained the grace to accept
All the days
The week, the months, the years,
All the decades it’s been in place
Chaffing
Until the rope and my skin are the same thing

But I’m not the same
I’ve learned, I’m learning to balance in this space
Between the past — which cannot be remade
And the future — which cannot be controlled
I’m learning to love now
I’m 41 years old
And I’ll tie no more ropes around my neck
If you want me you’ll have to catch me
And feel my wet hot breath against your chest as you tie the knot

This is the truth
I stand before you naked
Take me as I am
Or leave me be